𖹭 bouquets for people who cannot say what they mean
𖹭 love letters
𖹭 thin ice
꩜ .ᐟ martin
𖹭 perfect match 𓇼 perfect match 2 𓇼 perfect match final
𖹭 a completely avoidable romance
𖹭 leader not found!
𓇼 added to chat 𓇼 terminal 3 𓇼 unread messages
𓇼 jade handles it 𓇼 comeback day 𓇼 liked by cortis_bighit
𓇼 insomnia activities 𓇼 everybody knows somebody 𓇼 green means stay
꩜ .ᐟ juhoon
𖹭 read receipts & ruined lives
𖹭 sleepless in seoul
BOYNEXTDOOR Ი𐑼
Ი𐑼 taesan
𖹭 a walk to remember 𓇼 warm lights & bold moves 𓇼 small connections on the road 𓇼 under the comfort of a blanket 𓇼 her pov - but i like you 𓇼 harmony of hearts - i think i'm falling for you
synopsis:- Sera has never been ice skating. James has been on ice for basically his entire life — a detail he neglects to mention until she's already fallen twice and threatened to sue the rink emotionally. What follows is one afternoon of catastrophic skating, deadpan teasing, a quiet moment where he stops teasing and just holds her hands instead, and a kiss she initiates while still moving and almost takes them both down. Ends on a freezing bench with terrible vending machine hot chocolate and his hand in his pocket around hers.
tags:- fluff, oneshot, ice skating james x oc, james x reader, james is so dry i love him, he played ice hockey for TEN years and said nothing, reader is catastrophically bad, james barely contains himself the whole time, the pressed lips thing, teasing to soft slow burn lite, emotionally competent in quiet ways, she kissed him first, laughing into kisses, physically close, naturally hand holding, winter cinematic vibes, found warmth, cozy ending, this man notices everything actually, earned romance
The rental skates were a crime against humanity.
Sera had said this twice already — once when the man behind the counter handed them to her without making eye contact, and once when she actually tried to put them on and her ankle bent sideways in a way ankles were not meant to bend.
"These are too small," she announced.
"They're the right size," James said. He was already lacing his own up, which was annoying, because he was doing it with the quiet, competent energy of someone who had done this ten thousand times. No fumbling. No hesitation. Just neat, efficient pulls of the lace.
"They feel small."
"They're going to feel weird at first. That's normal."
"You said this would be fun."
"I said it could be fun." He glanced up briefly. "There's a difference."
She pointed at him. He went back to lacing.
The rink itself was exactly what you'd expect from a winter afternoon at a mid-tier city ice rink: too bright, a little too cold, with the kind of pop song playing overhead that you sort of recognized but couldn't name. The ice had that particular gleam to it — slightly scratched from the morning sessions, reflections of the overhead lights smearing across the surface. A child in a green helmet whipped past the entrance with terrifying confidence. The fogged-up windows made everything feel sealed off from the rest of the world, which might have been romantic if Sera weren't currently fighting with her left skate.
James crouched in front of her without being asked. "Give me your foot."
"I can do it myself—"
"You've been on the same lace for four minutes."
She gave him her foot.
He fixed it properly, tightening from the toe up, fingers quick and practiced. She looked down at the top of his head and tried to decide if it was embarrassing or just convenient that he clearly knew what he was doing and she clearly didn't. He looked up when he finished, checking her face briefly, and she was suddenly very aware of how close that was.
"Other one," he said.
She gave him the other one.
They made it to the ice in seven minutes.
Sera lasted approximately twelve seconds before her legs did something she could only describe as leaving her body.
The ice came up very fast.
"You okay?" James was beside her almost immediately, one hand on her arm, but she noticed — she definitely noticed — that he had not even slightly lost his footing to get there. He was just there, steady as furniture, looking down at her on the ice with an expression that was trying very hard to be concerned and not quite making it.
"Fine," she said, and grabbed the railing to pull herself up. The railing was cold through her gloves. Everything was cold. The back of her coat was now wet.
"You're supposed to glide," James said.
"I was gliding."
"You were walking aggressively and then falling."
"That's a type of gliding."
He pressed his lips together. She had learned, over the months of knowing him, that this was what he did instead of laughing. She found it deeply annoying.
"Can we just—" She gestured vaguely at the expanse of ice in front of them. "Go slowly?"
"We can go however slowly you need to."
They went. Sera made it one meter before grabbing a passing stranger by the sleeve.
The stranger — a woman in a yellow puffer jacket — looked at her.
"Sorry," Sera said. "Sorry, I thought you were — I'm so sorry."
The woman gave her a diplomatic look and moved on. James, who had watched the entire thing from a safe distance, was doing the pressed-lips thing again with considerably more intensity.
"Not a word," Sera said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"Your face is saying something."
"My face is just a face."
She pointed at him. He skated slightly to the right — which was away from her pointing finger — and continued looking neutral.
By what Sera was generously calling her third lap, she had developed a working theory: the ice was against her specifically. This was not a skill issue. This was a targeted geological event. She made this argument out loud and James listened to all of it without interrupting, which she appreciated, and then said, "Or you're tense," which she did not appreciate.
"That seven-year-old just lapped you twice," he said, coming alongside her. He had been skating backwards for the last thirty seconds to stay at her pace, which was both helpful and wildly condescending.
"I know."
"He lapped you while eating a Popsicle."
"I know, James."
"He wasn't even looking at where he was going—"
"I know."
He stopped talking. But she could see, in her peripheral vision, the specific way his shoulder moved when he was containing himself.
They went a bit further. Cheap music overhead gave way to a different song, louder, something with a lot of bass. The lights made everything slightly too vivid. Sera concentrated on her feet, which were doing their best, even if their best was genuinely terrible.
"How are you so good at this?" she asked, mostly to fill the silence.
James shrugged. "I played ice hockey."
She turned to look at him. This was a mistake, because turning meant her weight shifted, and shifting weight meant the ice had an opportunity, and it took it immediately. James caught her by the waist before she went down — his grip easy, unhurried — but the sound she made was not a sound she ever wanted to make in front of another person.
"Ice hockey," she repeated, once she had her footing back. His hand was still at her back. "For how long."
"Ten years."
A silence.
"Ten years," Sera said.
"Yeah."
"You played ice hockey for ten years and you brought me here and just — didn't mention that."
"You didn't ask."
"James."
"You said it would be fun," he said, perfectly serious. "To try something new."
She stared at him. He stared back. Somewhere behind her, the seven-year-old with the Popsicle lapped her again.
"I'm going to sue this rink," Sera said.
"For what."
"Emotionally. Several different ways."
She fell badly twenty minutes later.
Not dangerously — she wasn't hurt — but it was the kind of fall where you go down hard on both knees and one palm and stay there for a beat too long, and everyone within ten feet does that polite, wincing thing where they look just slightly away.
She got up fine. She laughed it off. She said something about the ice owing her a formal apology.
But something had shifted slightly in her face when she reached the railing, and James noticed. He noticed the way you notice something you've been quietly watching for a while — not surprised, just present with it.
"Hey," he said.
"I'm fine." She was looking at the ice, not at him. "I'm just — I'm really bad at this."
"Yeah."
"Like. Actually bad. Not funny bad. Just bad."
He didn't argue with that, which she appreciated more than she expected to. He leaned against the railing beside her. The rink noise continued around them — cheap music, skate scrapes, a kid shrieking somewhere with what sounded like pure delight.
"I was terrible when I first started," he said.
She looked at him. He was watching the ice.
"Hockey?"
"Before that. Just skating. I fell constantly. It looked horrible." A pause. "My coach made me do drills in the parking lot before he'd let me back on the actual rink."
"That sounds traumatic."
"It was character-building." He finally looked at her. "You're trying too hard not to fall. That's the problem. You're so scared of going down that you keep locking up, and then you have nothing to push against."
She thought about that.
"Trust the ice a little," he said. "It's not actually trying to kill you."
"I have evidence to the contrary."
"Come on." He pushed off the railing and held out both hands toward her. "Both. We'll go slow."
She looked at his hands. She took them.
He skated backwards — naturally, easily, like it cost him nothing — and pulled her with him, slowly enough that she could actually find the rhythm of push-and-glide instead of just surviving moment to moment. Her skates stopped fighting and started cooperating, marginally. The cold air came against her face. The music overhead became less irritating, or maybe she just stopped hearing it.
"There," he said.
"Don't say 'there' like I'm learning to walk."
"You kind of are."
She kicked at his skate. He didn't even wobble.
They went like that for a while — him backwards, her slowly figuring out what her feet were supposed to be doing, both their damp gloves interlaced — and she didn't fall once. When she finally looked up from watching her own skates, she found him already watching her, and she made a face.
"What."
"Nothing," he said.
"You're doing a thing."
"I'm skating."
"You're doing a face thing."
He looked away. She could see the corner of his mouth.
She skated half a lap on her own.
Not gracefully — her arms were at an alarming angle and she was definitely making an expression she'd be embarrassed about if she ever saw it on camera — but she did it without falling and without grabbing anything. James stayed close, close enough that she knew he'd catch her if she went down, but far enough that the half-lap was hers.
When she made it back to where he was standing, breathless and more than a little smug, he was already smiling. Not the pressed-lips thing. Just — actually smiling, quiet and real.
She kissed him first.
It was short and impulsive and slightly awkward because she was still moving when she did it, and had to grab his jacket to stop herself from sliding. He laughed against her mouth — actually laughed, which was not romantic in any traditional sense but felt like exactly the right response — and caught her with both arms, and they stood there on the ice being stupid about it for a moment while the music played and the seven-year-old presumably lapped them both.
"That was—" she started.
"Yeah," he agreed.
"I still think the rink owes me damages."
"Emotionally."
"Emotionally. Physically. Spiritually. Several ways."
He brushed something off her sleeve — probably snow from the railing — absentmindedly, the way you do something without deciding to. Then, while still looking at her sleeve, he kissed her cheek. Just like that.
She decided not to say anything about it.
They stayed until the session ended, which was longer than either of them planned. By the time they handed the skates back, Sera's ankles felt like they'd been through a pasta machine and James had a slight mark on his shoulder from where she had, at one critical point, grabbed him hard enough to matter. He didn't mention it. She appreciated that.
Outside, it was snowing very lightly. The kind of snow that doesn't accumulate — it just makes the air look different, softer somehow, like the city had put a filter on.
They found a bench near the entrance and sat there with vending machine hot chocolate, which was terrible in the specific way only machine hot chocolate can be: aggressively sweet, slightly lukewarm, in a cup so thin it felt like it was trying to burn you and failing.
"You know," James said, "I've never seen someone get personally offended by ice before."
"I wasn't offended by the ice. I was offended by the situation."
"You said 'I hate you' to the ice. Directly to it."
"That was emotional venting."
"You pointed at it."
"I was indicating the source of my frustration." She wrapped both hands around the terrible cup. "And I maintained my dignity throughout."
He looked at her.
"Throughout most of it," she amended.
He was doing the pressed-lips thing again, but there was something different about it now. Softer, maybe. Less like he was containing amusement and more like he was just — content. Sitting on a freezing bench with terrible hot chocolate, watching her aggressively revise her own narrative.
Her fingers were getting cold where they weren't covered by the cup. James noticed before she said anything — she hadn't said anything — and reached over and slipped her hand into his jacket pocket, still holding it.
She looked at their hands, then at him.
He was watching the snow do its gentle, useless thing on the pavement. His profile in the winter light was annoyingly calm, the same way he'd been calm on the ice, the same way he was calm about most things. It used to read as cold, when she'd first met him. She knew now it was just where he kept everything — below the surface, deliberate, quiet until it wasn't.
"Thin ice," he said.
"You're so annoying," she said.
He kissed her again — properly this time, one hand still in his pocket with hers, his other hand finding the back of her neck — and she laughed a little into it because she couldn't help it, and he kissed her anyway, and the snow kept doing its unhelpful thing around them, and somewhere nearby the rink hummed on without them.
It tasted like terrible hot chocolate and cold air and the beginning of something that was going to matter very deeply later on.
synopsis:- Sera has never been ice skating. James has been on ice for basically his entire life — a detail he neglects to mention until she's already fallen twice and threatened to sue the rink emotionally. What follows is one afternoon of catastrophic skating, deadpan teasing, a quiet moment where he stops teasing and just holds her hands instead, and a kiss she initiates while still moving and almost takes them both down. Ends on a freezing bench with terrible vending machine hot chocolate and his hand in his pocket around hers.
tags:- fluff, oneshot, ice skating james x oc, james x reader, james is so dry i love him, he played ice hockey for TEN years and said nothing, reader is catastrophically bad, james barely contains himself the whole time, the pressed lips thing, teasing to soft slow burn lite, emotionally competent in quiet ways, she kissed him first, laughing into kisses, physically close, naturally hand holding, winter cinematic vibes, found warmth, cozy ending, this man notices everything actually, earned romance
The rental skates were a crime against humanity.
Sera had said this twice already — once when the man behind the counter handed them to her without making eye contact, and once when she actually tried to put them on and her ankle bent sideways in a way ankles were not meant to bend.
"These are too small," she announced.
"They're the right size," James said. He was already lacing his own up, which was annoying, because he was doing it with the quiet, competent energy of someone who had done this ten thousand times. No fumbling. No hesitation. Just neat, efficient pulls of the lace.
"They feel small."
"They're going to feel weird at first. That's normal."
"You said this would be fun."
"I said it could be fun." He glanced up briefly. "There's a difference."
She pointed at him. He went back to lacing.
The rink itself was exactly what you'd expect from a winter afternoon at a mid-tier city ice rink: too bright, a little too cold, with the kind of pop song playing overhead that you sort of recognized but couldn't name. The ice had that particular gleam to it — slightly scratched from the morning sessions, reflections of the overhead lights smearing across the surface. A child in a green helmet whipped past the entrance with terrifying confidence. The fogged-up windows made everything feel sealed off from the rest of the world, which might have been romantic if Sera weren't currently fighting with her left skate.
James crouched in front of her without being asked. "Give me your foot."
"I can do it myself—"
"You've been on the same lace for four minutes."
She gave him her foot.
He fixed it properly, tightening from the toe up, fingers quick and practiced. She looked down at the top of his head and tried to decide if it was embarrassing or just convenient that he clearly knew what he was doing and she clearly didn't. He looked up when he finished, checking her face briefly, and she was suddenly very aware of how close that was.
"Other one," he said.
She gave him the other one.
They made it to the ice in seven minutes.
Sera lasted approximately twelve seconds before her legs did something she could only describe as leaving her body.
The ice came up very fast.
"You okay?" James was beside her almost immediately, one hand on her arm, but she noticed — she definitely noticed — that he had not even slightly lost his footing to get there. He was just there, steady as furniture, looking down at her on the ice with an expression that was trying very hard to be concerned and not quite making it.
"Fine," she said, and grabbed the railing to pull herself up. The railing was cold through her gloves. Everything was cold. The back of her coat was now wet.
"You're supposed to glide," James said.
"I was gliding."
"You were walking aggressively and then falling."
"That's a type of gliding."
He pressed his lips together. She had learned, over the months of knowing him, that this was what he did instead of laughing. She found it deeply annoying.
"Can we just—" She gestured vaguely at the expanse of ice in front of them. "Go slowly?"
"We can go however slowly you need to."
They went. Sera made it one meter before grabbing a passing stranger by the sleeve.
The stranger — a woman in a yellow puffer jacket — looked at her.
"Sorry," Sera said. "Sorry, I thought you were — I'm so sorry."
The woman gave her a diplomatic look and moved on. James, who had watched the entire thing from a safe distance, was doing the pressed-lips thing again with considerably more intensity.
"Not a word," Sera said.
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"Your face is saying something."
"My face is just a face."
She pointed at him. He skated slightly to the right — which was away from her pointing finger — and continued looking neutral.
By what Sera was generously calling her third lap, she had developed a working theory: the ice was against her specifically. This was not a skill issue. This was a targeted geological event. She made this argument out loud and James listened to all of it without interrupting, which she appreciated, and then said, "Or you're tense," which she did not appreciate.
"That seven-year-old just lapped you twice," he said, coming alongside her. He had been skating backwards for the last thirty seconds to stay at her pace, which was both helpful and wildly condescending.
"I know."
"He lapped you while eating a Popsicle."
"I know, James."
"He wasn't even looking at where he was going—"
"I know."
He stopped talking. But she could see, in her peripheral vision, the specific way his shoulder moved when he was containing himself.
They went a bit further. Cheap music overhead gave way to a different song, louder, something with a lot of bass. The lights made everything slightly too vivid. Sera concentrated on her feet, which were doing their best, even if their best was genuinely terrible.
"How are you so good at this?" she asked, mostly to fill the silence.
James shrugged. "I played ice hockey."
She turned to look at him. This was a mistake, because turning meant her weight shifted, and shifting weight meant the ice had an opportunity, and it took it immediately. James caught her by the waist before she went down — his grip easy, unhurried — but the sound she made was not a sound she ever wanted to make in front of another person.
"Ice hockey," she repeated, once she had her footing back. His hand was still at her back. "For how long."
"Ten years."
A silence.
"Ten years," Sera said.
"Yeah."
"You played ice hockey for ten years and you brought me here and just — didn't mention that."
"You didn't ask."
"James."
"You said it would be fun," he said, perfectly serious. "To try something new."
She stared at him. He stared back. Somewhere behind her, the seven-year-old with the Popsicle lapped her again.
"I'm going to sue this rink," Sera said.
"For what."
"Emotionally. Several different ways."
She fell badly twenty minutes later.
Not dangerously — she wasn't hurt — but it was the kind of fall where you go down hard on both knees and one palm and stay there for a beat too long, and everyone within ten feet does that polite, wincing thing where they look just slightly away.
She got up fine. She laughed it off. She said something about the ice owing her a formal apology.
But something had shifted slightly in her face when she reached the railing, and James noticed. He noticed the way you notice something you've been quietly watching for a while — not surprised, just present with it.
"Hey," he said.
"I'm fine." She was looking at the ice, not at him. "I'm just — I'm really bad at this."
"Yeah."
"Like. Actually bad. Not funny bad. Just bad."
He didn't argue with that, which she appreciated more than she expected to. He leaned against the railing beside her. The rink noise continued around them — cheap music, skate scrapes, a kid shrieking somewhere with what sounded like pure delight.
"I was terrible when I first started," he said.
She looked at him. He was watching the ice.
"Hockey?"
"Before that. Just skating. I fell constantly. It looked horrible." A pause. "My coach made me do drills in the parking lot before he'd let me back on the actual rink."
"That sounds traumatic."
"It was character-building." He finally looked at her. "You're trying too hard not to fall. That's the problem. You're so scared of going down that you keep locking up, and then you have nothing to push against."
She thought about that.
"Trust the ice a little," he said. "It's not actually trying to kill you."
"I have evidence to the contrary."
"Come on." He pushed off the railing and held out both hands toward her. "Both. We'll go slow."
She looked at his hands. She took them.
He skated backwards — naturally, easily, like it cost him nothing — and pulled her with him, slowly enough that she could actually find the rhythm of push-and-glide instead of just surviving moment to moment. Her skates stopped fighting and started cooperating, marginally. The cold air came against her face. The music overhead became less irritating, or maybe she just stopped hearing it.
"There," he said.
"Don't say 'there' like I'm learning to walk."
"You kind of are."
She kicked at his skate. He didn't even wobble.
They went like that for a while — him backwards, her slowly figuring out what her feet were supposed to be doing, both their damp gloves interlaced — and she didn't fall once. When she finally looked up from watching her own skates, she found him already watching her, and she made a face.
"What."
"Nothing," he said.
"You're doing a thing."
"I'm skating."
"You're doing a face thing."
He looked away. She could see the corner of his mouth.
She skated half a lap on her own.
Not gracefully — her arms were at an alarming angle and she was definitely making an expression she'd be embarrassed about if she ever saw it on camera — but she did it without falling and without grabbing anything. James stayed close, close enough that she knew he'd catch her if she went down, but far enough that the half-lap was hers.
When she made it back to where he was standing, breathless and more than a little smug, he was already smiling. Not the pressed-lips thing. Just — actually smiling, quiet and real.
She kissed him first.
It was short and impulsive and slightly awkward because she was still moving when she did it, and had to grab his jacket to stop herself from sliding. He laughed against her mouth — actually laughed, which was not romantic in any traditional sense but felt like exactly the right response — and caught her with both arms, and they stood there on the ice being stupid about it for a moment while the music played and the seven-year-old presumably lapped them both.
"That was—" she started.
"Yeah," he agreed.
"I still think the rink owes me damages."
"Emotionally."
"Emotionally. Physically. Spiritually. Several ways."
He brushed something off her sleeve — probably snow from the railing — absentmindedly, the way you do something without deciding to. Then, while still looking at her sleeve, he kissed her cheek. Just like that.
She decided not to say anything about it.
They stayed until the session ended, which was longer than either of them planned. By the time they handed the skates back, Sera's ankles felt like they'd been through a pasta machine and James had a slight mark on his shoulder from where she had, at one critical point, grabbed him hard enough to matter. He didn't mention it. She appreciated that.
Outside, it was snowing very lightly. The kind of snow that doesn't accumulate — it just makes the air look different, softer somehow, like the city had put a filter on.
They found a bench near the entrance and sat there with vending machine hot chocolate, which was terrible in the specific way only machine hot chocolate can be: aggressively sweet, slightly lukewarm, in a cup so thin it felt like it was trying to burn you and failing.
"You know," James said, "I've never seen someone get personally offended by ice before."
"I wasn't offended by the ice. I was offended by the situation."
"You said 'I hate you' to the ice. Directly to it."
"That was emotional venting."
"You pointed at it."
"I was indicating the source of my frustration." She wrapped both hands around the terrible cup. "And I maintained my dignity throughout."
He looked at her.
"Throughout most of it," she amended.
He was doing the pressed-lips thing again, but there was something different about it now. Softer, maybe. Less like he was containing amusement and more like he was just — content. Sitting on a freezing bench with terrible hot chocolate, watching her aggressively revise her own narrative.
Her fingers were getting cold where they weren't covered by the cup. James noticed before she said anything — she hadn't said anything — and reached over and slipped her hand into his jacket pocket, still holding it.
She looked at their hands, then at him.
He was watching the snow do its gentle, useless thing on the pavement. His profile in the winter light was annoyingly calm, the same way he'd been calm on the ice, the same way he was calm about most things. It used to read as cold, when she'd first met him. She knew now it was just where he kept everything — below the surface, deliberate, quiet until it wasn't.
"Thin ice," he said.
"You're so annoying," she said.
He kissed her again — properly this time, one hand still in his pocket with hers, his other hand finding the back of her neck — and she laughed a little into it because she couldn't help it, and he kissed her anyway, and the snow kept doing its unhelpful thing around them, and somewhere nearby the rink hummed on without them.
It tasted like terrible hot chocolate and cold air and the beginning of something that was going to matter very deeply later on.
⌗ SYNOPSIS - in which James is your stan acc oomf on twitter during pandemic days, and once you retrieved the account you suddenly remember him and start talking for a while again, not knowing he's a k-pop idol already.
৻ꪆ idol!james x non-idol! reader ৻ꪆ
⧽ warnings ┆ separate ficion from reality, kpop twt stan account moments , cringe self , fake texts n tweets, vulgar insults n jokes, ooc james, idk ?
⧽ note ┆ reader's online name as tzu (based from twice's tzuyu) , and james' online name as yu (from yufan) , you can't unconvince me James doesn't have a stan acc he's on his phone 24/7 , cleaning up the ideas filled in my notes app pls bear with me lol
SYNOPSIS! When Lily Parker discovers a worn notebook abandoned at a secondhand bookstore, she finds herself reading the intimate, unsent letters of a stranger—someone processing loneliness, burnout, and the fear of disappearing beneath performance. She writes a response in the margin without thinking. He writes back. What unfolds is a profound love story told entirely through handwritten fragments, where two people fall in love with each other's minds long before they know each other's names. But when their secret is exposed and his identity as a member of the country's biggest idol group is revealed, Lily and James must decide whether their love—built on anonymity and silence—can survive becoming visible to the world.
tags! inspired by love letter - a japanese movie, contemporary romance, epistolary novel, slow-burn, seoul, literary fiction, found notebook, anonymous correspondence, intimacy through language, secret relationship, quiet heartbreak, falling in love with words, celebrity romance, unreliable performance vs authentic self, happy ending though so don't worry, set in 1995.
comfort fic :)
PART ONE: WINTER
I. THE BOOKSTORE
The secondhand bookstore near Sinchon smells like old paper, dust, and the particular sadness of forgotten things. Lily Parker likes this smell. She likes the way light falls through the front window at three in the afternoon, catching dust motes that look like tiny constellations. She likes how the store is never quite warm enough, so customers keep their coats on, moving through the aisles like ghosts haunting a place they once belonged.
It's December. Seoul is doing that thing it does in winter—becoming somehow both more beautiful and more lonely. The streets narrow under gray sky. People walk faster, shoulders hunched against the cold. Neon signs reflect off wet pavement. Steam rises from street vendor carts and café windows, fogging the glass with brief, temporary warmth.
Lily works three afternoons a week at the bookstore, shelving returns and alphabetizing donations. The owner, Mr. Lee, is a quiet man in his seventies who seems content to let the store exist as a kind of peaceful accident. He trusts Lily to organize things her own way, which means the stock follows no strict system—contemporary fiction near philosophy, poetry stacked horizontally across the top of self-help books, translations scattered like seeds through every section. Customers often can't find what they're looking for, but they always find something.
Today is one of those days where the light is particularly beautiful and also particularly depressing. Lily stands on a stepladder, returning books to the poetry section, when she notices something unusual on the floor near the reading chairs by the window.
A notebook.
Not a nice notebook—not one of those expensive journals with leather bindings and blank pages that cost more than a week's worth of coffee. This one is worn, the spine cracked, the cover a faded dark blue that might have once been navy. The edges of the pages are soft from handling, slightly yellowed. There's coffee staining the bottom corner.
Lily picks it up. It's warm, as if someone has just set it down.
She opens it carefully, the way you'd open something very old.
The pages are filled with handwriting. Not neat handwriting—not the careful penmanship of someone conscious of being observed. This is the handwriting of someone writing alone, at odd hours, thoughts moving faster than the hand can catch them. Some words are pressed so hard into the paper they nearly tear through. Others are so light they're barely visible, as if the writer was already half-asleep.
Lily reads the first page:
I don't know why I'm writing this. There's no one to send it to. There's no one who should read it. But if I don't write it, I think it will keep circling in my head until I forget what it originally felt like, and then I'll be left with just the pale ghost of the feeling, which is worse than not feeling at all.
She closes the notebook gently. Sets it on the counter.
She should find out who it belongs to. There might be a name inside, contact information. But first, she works until six o'clock, and by then the store is empty except for Mr. Lee, who is reading a newspaper in the back room with a cup of green tea that has probably gone cold.
"Someone left this," Lily says, placing the notebook on the counter.
Mr. Lee glances at it over his glasses. Adjusts them. Looks again.
"Did they come back?" he asks.
"Not while I was here."
"Leave it on the counter. If they remember, they'll come looking."
Lily nods, but she doesn't leave it on the counter. Instead, she places it on the shelf behind the register, where it won't be easily visible but also won't be lost. She tells herself this is practical. It's easier to keep track of lost items this way.
This is a small lie she tells herself, and she knows it.
The truth is: she's curious.
The notebook stays behind the register for three days.
No one comes looking for it. Lily thinks about it constantly. During her morning classes—a lecture on Victorian literature that she only half-listens to because she's thinking about the handwriting on page one. During lunch, when she sits in the university library's reading room and tries to finish an essay about narrative unreliability. During her walk home through the cold Seoul evening, when she passes ajummas bundled in puffy coats and young couples sharing earbuds, and she thinks: someone is missing this. Someone is looking for this.
Or: maybe someone is relieved to have lost it.
On the fourth day, a Saturday, when the bookstore is busier than usual—a few scattered customers, a girl studying in the corner, an older man browsing the history section—Lily finally allows herself to open the notebook again.
She opens it to a random page. Reads:
I performed for fifteen thousand people last night. Did the same choreography I've done a thousand times. Hit the same mark on stage. Smiled at the camera. Everything was perfect. Technically perfect. I watched the footage this morning and I looked like a real person doing real things, and I remember being there, in my body, but I also remember being somewhere else. Watching myself from far away. Like I was in the audience watching someone who looks exactly like me.
When I got home, I couldn't remember what any of the songs felt like anymore.
Lily sits down slowly in the reading chair by the window. The December light is fading—it's only three in the afternoon but already the sun is sinking, painting the sky that specific color of winter that exists nowhere else in the world.
She turns to the next page:
I think the problem is that I became famous by accident. I don't think I was supposed to. I think somewhere in another timeline, I'm just a normal person, and in that version of my life, I remember what music feels like without having to think about the choreography simultaneously. I remember what it feels like to be bored. That sounds like a small thing, but boredom means your mind is yours. Once you stop owning your own mind, you stop owning very much.
I wonder what that version of me is doing right now.
There's a small illustration in the margin. A rough sketch of what might be a person sitting on a bench, or maybe just sitting. It's drawn so lightly it's barely there.
Lily closes the notebook. Opens it again. She shouldn't be reading this. This is someone's privacy, someone's loneliness, and she's intruding on it. But she also can't seem to stop.
She reads about trainee days. About a friend named Juhoon. About the particular exhaustion of learning dance at four in the morning when your body has stopped responding to commands and your brain has stopped making sense of your limbs. About watching older members debut, and the feeling of being left behind, and then the shock of being chosen, and then the shock of how hollow being chosen can feel when there are cameras recording the hollow moment.
She reads about songs that never made it onto albums. About the lyric that took six months to write correctly. About the lyrics that are so personal they can never be released because anyone who knew you would recognize themselves in the lines, and then they'd know you wrote about them, and then everything would be ruined.
The handwriting changes throughout the notebook. Some sections are careful and controlled. Others are almost indecipherable, as if the writer was angry or crying while writing, or both.
There are sketches. Mostly small, mostly barely-there. A coffee cup. A window. A profile of a face she doesn't recognize. Numbers that might be dates. Song fragments that look like lyrics but aren't quite coherent.
And then, roughly halfway through the notebook, Lily finds a section dated almost a month ago:
I went to the concert yesterday. The whole group. It was a small thing, a university thing, nothing official. But I stood at the back and I watched people—not the musicians, just the people in the audience—and I realized that we give them something. Not just entertainment. We give them a place to exist outside of time for a while. We give them permission to feel things intensely in the dark. And that's a real thing. That matters. I know it matters because I saw this girl—I don't know her age, maybe college-aged, maybe younger—and she was crying, and the tears were real, and she was crying because something someone else had written and performed had made her feel brave enough to be sad in public.
So maybe it's okay that parts of me are disappearing. If the parts I'm losing are being given to other people. If pieces of my loneliness are becoming pieces of their bravery.
That's not a small trade.
There's a long silence after this entry. Then, a few pages later, in handwriting that looks slightly different—or maybe the same handwriting at a different time of day, a different mood—a single line:
I want to write something that matters. Not something famous. Just something that matters to one person. Something that makes one person feel less alone.
The entry is unfinished.
Lily reads this line several times. She reads it so many times that she nearly memorizes it, which means she's already started carrying it with her, already started making it hers.
She should return this notebook immediately. She knows this. There might be a way to identify the person—she could check social media, ask customers, post about it online. The responsible thing would be to try.
Instead, she slides the notebook into the empty shelf space behind the register again.
And tomorrow, or the next day, she thinks, she will write a response.
She doesn't know why she thinks this. The impulse doesn't make sense. Whoever wrote these words isn't asking for a response. They don't know anyone will ever read them. They're writing into silence.
But Lily has spent her entire life reading the words of strangers. Books are filled with people speaking across time and death and distance. The most intimate conversations she's ever had are with writers who've been dead for a hundred years. Why shouldn't she answer back?
She tells herself this is just an extension of being a reader.
This is a second small lie, and a bigger one.
She waits until Monday.
The bookstore is quiet on Monday afternoons. Mr. Lee usually leaves early to attend something—Lily has never asked what, and he's never volunteered the information. This is the kind of relationship they have: companionable, undemanding, happy to exist in parallel without requiring constant explanation.
By two o'clock, Lily is alone.
She brings the notebook out from behind the register. Sets it on the counter. Finds a pen—a nice pen, not just any pen, but one she actually likes, with dark blue ink that writes smoothly. She's borrowed it from the drawer where Mr. Lee keeps writing supplies for customers who want to leave notes inside books.
She thinks for a long time about what to write.
She opens the notebook to the last unfinished entry:
I want to write something that matters. Not something famous. Just something that matters to one person. Something that makes one person feel less alone.
And in the margin, very carefully, in handwriting she tries to make as neat as possible (though she knows she'll never be really neat, her hand naturally leans forward, eager, the words always slightly rushed), she writes:
You already have.
She draws a very small bracket around the words. Steps back. Stares at what she's done.
It's a small thing. Four words. She's just told a stranger that their private writing, their secret loneliness, has already touched someone. That someone read their unfinished thought and felt less alone because of it.
This is a very dangerous thing to have written.
She almost erases it. Her hand hovers over the pen, ready to scratch the words into illegibility.
But she doesn't.
Instead, she closes the notebook. Returns it to the shelf. And tells herself that this is the end of it. This is the completion of a small moment of human connection that will now fade back into silence, which is how it should be.
She genuinely believes this, for exactly twenty-three hours.
On Tuesday, when she opens the bookstore at noon and retrieves the notebook from the shelf, she sees that something has appeared beneath her four words:
Who are you?
Lily doesn't answer immediately.
She takes the notebook home to her small studio apartment in a building near Ewha Womans University, far from the noise of Sinchon but close enough to get there by bus. The apartment is the size of a generous closet. A bed, a desk, a shelf for books, a window that looks out onto an alley where old ajummas hang laundry. She keeps the apartment very clean because there's nowhere for disorder to hide.
She sits on her bed—the only place to sit besides her desk—and holds the notebook.
The fact that the person has written back changes everything. This is no longer a one-sided act of intrusion. This is an opening. An invitation. A conversation that is now, undeniably, happening.
Who are you? is a question without an easy answer.
She could write her name. But her name would reduce her to a searchable person—a Google image, a social media profile, a fixed identity. Right now she is just a voice. A reader. A stranger who understood something true about the words she read.
She could write: Someone who reads. Someone who listens.
But that's vague to the point of being dismissive.
She could write nothing. Return the notebook to the shelf and wait to see what happens.
Instead, she writes:
I'm the person who found your notebook. I'm not returning it because I think maybe you meant for someone to find it. And maybe you meant for them to answer.
I can't tell you who I am yet. But I can tell you that what you wrote is true. That you've already written something that matters.
She adds: You're not as alone as you think.
Then, because she doesn't want the tone to be entirely serious, she adds beneath this:
Also, the coffee stain on page 47 is a nice touch. Very literary.
She finds page 47. There is indeed a coffee stain. It bleeds across a section where the handwriting is so light it's almost invisible.
She closes the notebook. Walks it back to the bookstore that evening, slipping it onto the shelf behind the register when Mr. Lee is in the back room.
Then she waits.
The replies come back within two days.
You're right. I think some part of me knew someone would find it. Some part of me maybe wanted someone to find it. But knowing that and having it happen are different things.
Can you tell me anything about who you are? Anything at all?
And thank you about the coffee. I was sad that day and I think I spilled it on purpose.
Lily reads this three times. The honesty of it—I think I spilled it on purpose—undoes something in her careful distance.
She writes back:
I study literature. I work at a bookstore. I like reading about the things people don't say out loud. I notice details that other people miss. I'm the kind of person who reads the same sentence multiple times just because the way the words fit together makes me feel something I can't quite explain.
I like that you spilled it on purpose. I like that you're honest about it.
And I like that you already knew someone would find this.
She pauses. Then adds:
What were you sad about? On the day you spilled the coffee?
This is crossing a line. This is no longer just offering comfort to a stranger. This is asking them to be known. This is the beginning of the conversation becoming real.
She writes the response carefully and returns the notebook to the shelf. For the next three days, she can barely concentrate in class. She finds herself thinking about what the answer will be. What kind of sadness would make someone spill coffee on purpose? What kind of sadness would make someone want to see the mark of it, preserved in the pages of their own private thoughts?
When she returns to the bookstore on Thursday, her hands are actually shaking as she reaches for the notebook.
The response is long. Pages long. So long that the pen changes partway through, suggesting it was written across multiple days:
I was sad about lots of things. I'm always sad about lots of things, in that ambient way where you stop noticing it and then suddenly you notice it all at once and it's so heavy you can't stand up. But specifically that day, it was about a conversation I had. Someone I care about said something that made me realize I've changed so much that they don't recognize me anymore. They looked at me like I was a stranger wearing someone they loved. And I wanted to tell them that I'm still me, somewhere underneath, but I couldn't find the place where I'm still me. So I spilled coffee on purpose because at least that's a real thing. At least I did something that mattered, even if it was just making a mess.
The reason I'm telling you this is because you asked. And because somehow, writing to you—to this voice I don't know, that doesn't have a face or a name attached to it—it's easier than actually talking to the people around me.
Is that sad? Or is that a relief?
I think it might be both.
Below this, in much smaller handwriting, almost a whisper on the page:
I want to keep writing to you. Is that okay?
Lily sits down in the reading chair. The chair by the window where she found the notebook, where she first read the strangers' loneliness. The December light is not beautiful today—the sky is completely overcast, gray from edge to edge. The city has turned monochrome.
She buys a coffee from the café next door. Deliberately chooses something hot that might stain. Sits with the notebook and writes:
It's both. It's entirely both.
And yes. Yes, of course it's okay. I want to keep writing to you too.
Can I ask you something though? Is this real? Are you really sad about being unrecognizable? Or are you writing what you think people want to read?
She holds her breath after she writes this. She's just accused this person of being dishonest. She's just suggested they're not to be trusted.
But she watches as, over the next few days, the responses come back, and they're the most honest thing anyone has ever written to her:
I asked myself this question for a while. Whether I'm always performing, even when I'm alone. Even when I think no one is looking.
But I think the answer is no. Not when I'm writing to you. With you, I don't have to be anyone. I don't have to be recognizable. I can just be confused and lonely and trying to figure out who I am underneath everything else.
Is that dishonest because I wouldn't say these things out loud to anyone? Or is it the most honest thing because I'm saying them at all?
I think I'm not sure.
But I know that when I'm writing these words, I'm being real. Whatever that means.
And then, a few days later, in a handwriting that looks like it was written very quickly, almost frantically:
I'm sorry. That was probably too intense. I'm not very good at this. At talking to people. At being honest. At admitting that I need something from someone else.
I think I scared you away.
Lily reads this at three in the morning, lying in bed, unable to sleep. She gets up. Goes to her desk in the cold darkness. Opens her laptop and messages Mr. Lee:
I'm coming in early tomorrow. Is that okay?
He responds within minutes, though it's the middle of the night:
Everything alright?
Yes. I just need to be at the bookstore.
In the morning, before the sun is fully up, Lily is at the bookstore. She opens the notebook and writes:
You didn't scare me away. You made me realize that I'm scared of something else entirely. I'm scared that I've been alone for so long that I've stopped knowing how to be known. I'm scared that if someone actually saw me—the real me, not the version I perform as—they'd leave.
But then I read your words, and I thought: what if being unknown is scarier than being abandoned?
What if the point of finding each other, even in silence, even in writing, even between pages, is exactly this—this moment where we stop performing and start being real?
I didn't scare away. I'm still here. I'm right here.
She closes the notebook carefully. Waits.
By the afternoon, when she returns from her morning classes, the response is already there:
I think I'm falling in love with you. I think I fell in love with you the moment you wrote "You already have." And I know that's crazy because I don't know who you are. I don't know your name or what you look like or anything real about you except the way your mind works and the way you write and the fact that you read my words like they mattered.
But they do matter. And so do you.
Lily stands in the quiet bookstore, the notebook trembling slightly in her hands, and realizes: she's fallen in love too.
The correspondence intensifies.
They write almost daily now, sometimes multiple times a day. Lily will slip into the bookstore between classes and find a new entry waiting. She'll respond immediately, waiting until evening to return the notebook to the shelf. Other customers come and go. Mr. Lee nods at her distracted presence. The world continues, but it feels small and distant, like watching something through a foggy window.
She learns things. Not his name—they've both agreed to maintain that anonymity, this beautiful silence where he exists as just a voice, and she exists as just a consciousness receiving his words. But she learns his rhythms. She learns that he writes at odd hours: 4 a.m., or late at night after performances, or during long waits in airports. The handwriting varies depending on his state of mind—sometimes rushed and almost angry, sometimes so careful it looks like calligraphy.
She learns that he has siblings he doesn't live with. That he was born in one country and grew up in another and now lives in a third. That he speaks languages she doesn't, and sometimes writes phrases in languages she has to guess at—she looks them up later, sits in the university library with a translation app and a notebook of her own, trying to decode his multilingual loneliness.
She learns that he has a best friend who knows him better than anyone, even though his best friend doesn't know who he really is beneath the performance. She learns that his work is music, but that music has become difficult because work changed it. She learns that he's terrified of what will happen to the people he loves if they get too close to him, because fame is a kind of contagion that infects everything.
And he learns things about her.
She tells him about her parents, who wanted her to study something practical and were baffled by her choice to move to Seoul to study literature. She tells him about the evening her mother asked her what job she was training for, and Lily realized her mother couldn't fathom a life built on reading and understanding beauty. She tells him about the feeling of being perpetually misunderstood, of having to pretend to be someone else—someone practical, someone with direction, someone who fits into the world—just to be tolerated.
She tells him that she's lonely in Seoul, even though the city has millions of people. That she comes to the bookstore because it's the only place where being interested in sad things is encouraged. That she underlines sentences in books not because she's trying to study but because she needs to mark the moments where another human, dead or alive, managed to say something true about what it means to exist.
She tells him that until she found his notebook, she'd started to believe that being understood was a luxury only available in fiction.
He writes back:
I think maybe that's where I was wrong. I thought being understood was dangerous. That if someone knew me, really knew me, they could hurt me. But being unknown is its own kind of hurt. Being seen as a symbol instead of a person, being loved by thousands of people who love an idea of you instead of you—that's a kind of loneliness that no crowd can touch.
And then you started writing, and I realized that this—this conversation, this being known slowly, through language, through fragments—maybe this is the only way I can actually be known. Not all at once, not with my face attached, not with everything on display. But slowly. Line by line. Until finally there's an entire person visible, constructed from nothing but words.
I want to know you like this forever. I want to write to you every day for the rest of my life and never know your real name.
Lily reads this and thinks: this is insane. This is the most insane and beautiful thing that has ever happened to her.
She writes:
Then let's do that. Let's make this a whole life. Let's construct a world where we only exist in these margins and these responses. Let's be the people we really are, but only to each other. Let's live in this notebook like it's a home.
I love you. I don't know how or why, because I don't know who you are. But I've never been more certain of anything.
Below this, she adds: Come to the bookstore. Not to meet me—I'm not ready for that, and I don't think you are either. But come sometimes. Sit in the reading chair by the window. Leave the notebook. Let me sit in that same chair and read your words, knowing you just sat there. Let's haunt the same space.
He writes back after three days:
I came today. I sat in the chair. I was terrified. I felt like if I breathed too loud you would know exactly who I was. I rewrote the same entry seventeen times before I left it for you.
Here's what I want to tell you: the world is so small that it's a miracle we found each other. And it's so big that we probably live within a few kilometers of each other right now, in this cold December city, and we don't even know. We could pass each other on the street. We could sit next to each other on the subway. We could stand in the same coffee shop and order from the same barista and have no idea that we're looking at the person who knows us best.
That thought terrifies me. But it also makes me feel brave. Because somehow, against impossible odds, we found each other anyway. Not through accident. Through something that felt like fate the moment I read your handwriting on my page.
I love you too. And I'm not ready to know your name either. But I think some part of me is ready to know the shape of you in the world, even if I don't know the name attached to that shape.
Lily reads this in the reading chair, exactly where he sat when he wrote it. She can imagine it—him, sitting in this very place, breathing carefully, rewriting words, trying to express something so real it could break if spoken aloud. She holds the notebook and feels like she's holding his hand across time, across silence, across the careful distance they've constructed between the truth and the telling of it.
December turns into January.
The city gets colder. Snow falls in Seoul, which is rare. The bookstore becomes something like a refuge—a place where winter can't quite touch, where dust motes and old paper create a kind of warmth that no radiator can provide.
They develop a rhythm. She'll leave entries about her days—details of her morning walk, a conversation overheard on the bus, a poem she read that made her cry. He'll respond with his own observations, parallel moments of loneliness that feel like echoes of hers, or sometimes direct answers, sometimes tangents into philosophy or music theory or the particular sadness of being misunderstood.
He writes about a concert he performed. About standing on stage and forgetting, for a moment, why he was there. About the moment when he remembered and the performance became real again. About the contradiction of thousands of people looking at you while you feel completely alone.
She writes about attending a concert—not his, she doesn't say, but he understands—and watching him from far away, understanding that everyone in the crowd was loving a version of him, and only she knew the real him, the one who wrote in margins and thought about disappearing and was terrified of being recognized.
He writes:
I saw you in the crowd. I'm not sure which person you were, but I felt you. I felt like maybe my eyes found you across fifteen thousand people, and for a moment, I wasn't performing. I was just seeing. And I think I was seeing you.
After the concert, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Someone in that crowd knows who I really am. Someone in that crowd loves me not for what I did on stage but for what I wrote in secret.
That thought got me through the next four shows.
By late January, they've written nearly a hundred pages.
The notebook is full now. Lily and he have used every margin, every blank space. Some pages are layered with writing—his responses written over her responses written over his original entries, creating palimpsests of conversation that are almost impossible to read but beautiful to look at. The handwriting changes constantly. Sometimes she writes in blue pen, sometimes pencil. He writes in black and gray and sometimes in red ink, which makes the words look urgent, like they need to be read immediately.
They're running out of space.
He writes on the very last blank page—the inside back cover:
We need to decide what happens now. Do we start a new notebook? Do we meet and become real people to each other, which feels like it will ruin everything? Or do we end here, leaving this as a perfect archive of a love that only existed in words?
I can't tell you what the right answer is, but I can tell you that I'm not ready to stop. I'm not ready to know your name, to see your face, to have you become a person I might be disappointed by. I'm not ready to translate this beautiful silence into the messy reality of actually being together.
But I also can't keep going like this. It's becoming painful in a different way now. The joy of writing to you is being mixed with the desperation of not knowing who you are, not being able to touch you, not being able to exist with you in the real world.
Tell me what you want to do. And whatever you decide, I'll accept it. Even if you decide to disappear. Even if you decide that this was just a beautiful dream and you want to wake up.
But I hope you don't. I hope you want the same thing I want, which is to keep going, somehow. Even if it's terrifying.
Lily reads this on a Monday evening, sitting in her apartment, and she knows that this is the moment where everything changes.
She goes to the bookstore the next morning, before her first class. It's very early, and Mr. Lee hasn't arrived yet, but he gave her a key months ago, trusting her with the space the way she's learned he trusts most people—completely and without explanation.
She stands in the empty bookstore. The dawn light is just beginning to filter through the windows. The store is full of shadows and the smell of old paper. She places her hand on the spine of a book and thinks about how she wants her life to be.
Then she sits down and pulls out a fresh notebook—a beautiful one, expensive, with handmade paper that has a slight texture that feels almost like skin. She'll buy it later, pay for it from her wages. Right now she's just using it.
She writes:
I want to know you. But I don't want to know your name yet. I don't want to Google you or see your face. I want to keep this mystery for a while longer.
But I want to know the shape of you. I want to know how you move through the world. I want to sit beside you and read your words knowing that you're sitting beside me, even if we're not quite looking at each other.
So here's what I propose: we meet, but we don't reveal our identities. We keep writing, but we also start speaking. I want to know what your voice sounds like. I want to know if we're comfortable in silence together the way we are on the page.
There's a café near the bookstore. It's small, tucked away, not the kind of place celebrities go. We could meet there. You could bring a book. I'll bring a book. We could sit at different tables if you want. We could pretend we're strangers who happen to be reading near each other. And after, we can come back here, to the bookstore, and leave each other letters about what it felt like to finally exist in the same physical space.
It's not perfect. It's probably not even wise. But I think I need to know if you're real in the world, not just in these pages.
If you want this, come to the café on Thursday at three o'clock. Order something. Sit by the window. Read. I'll be there too.
She closes the notebook. Leaves it on the counter for him to find.
And then she waits to see if her heart is about to be broken, or if it's about to become real.
PART TWO: RECOGNITION
II. THE CAFÉ
On Thursday at two-forty-five, Lily stands outside the café. It's small, older, the kind of place that serves expensive coffee and has exactly six tables. The window is slightly steamed from the warmth inside, creating a barrier between the cold afternoon and the comfort within.
She's wearing her best sweater. She's brushed her hair. She's done all the things that people do when they want to be presentable, which is ridiculous because she's also committed to not being recognized, not being known in the traditional sense. But she wants him to look at her, when he enters, and see something worth knowing.
She pushes open the door. Sits at a table with a good view of the entrance. Orders an Americano, even though she hates Americano, because it seems like the kind of drink a serious person would order.
At three o'clock exactly, a man enters.
Lily's breath catches.
He's tall. He's wearing dark clothes and a baseball cap pulled low. He's looking at his phone, trying to appear casual, but there's something in the way he moves that suggests he's very aware of every person in the café. He orders something—she doesn't hear what—and sits at the table diagonally across from her, the angle awkward enough that if they're not careful they won't even really see each other.
They both open their books.
He's reading poetry in Korean. She can see it clearly, the pages are thin and delicate.
She's reading a novel in English, something about heartbreak, something she picked because she thought it was appropriately on-the-nose.
Neither of them reads.
Lily stares at the same paragraph for fifteen minutes and doesn't absorb a single word. She's terrified. She's also exhilarated. This person, the person who's written all those words, who's told her his deepest fears and smallest joys, is sitting across from her. He's real. He has a face and hands and a way of sitting and a baseball cap that he's pushed a little too far down his head, possibly because he's trying to hide from someone.
She looks up, deliberately.
He's looking at her.
Their eyes meet, and she sees immediate recognition. He knows. Not who she is—not by face or name or any identifying feature—but he knows that she's the person. He can see it somehow. Can feel it across the distance.
He looks away quickly. Takes a sip of his coffee.
She looks back down at her book.
Neither of them moves for another ten minutes.
Then, very carefully, he stands up. Leaves a bill for his untouched coffee. Walks to the exit. Pauses at the door. And without looking back, he places a small piece of paper on the shelf beside the door, tucked between a plant and the wall, somewhere someone would have to be looking for it to find it.
He leaves.
Lily counts to fifty. Then she closes her book. Gets up. Retrieves the paper.
It's a single line, written in his handwriting:
It's really you. And somehow, I knew the moment I saw you.
She finds him at the bookstore that evening.
Not as a customer. He's brought a new notebook—the one she bought, the one with the handmade paper. He's left it on the counter, and inside the front cover, he's written:
I've been thinking about you so much that I was afraid to sit in the same room and breathe the same air, because I thought maybe you'd realize you don't actually like me. That the person in the notebook is carefully constructed, and the person in real life is just a tired man in a baseball cap trying not to be recognized.
But then I saw you, and you looked exactly the way I imagine you would look. Thoughtful. Careful. Slightly worried. The kind of person who would find a notebook and instead of returning it immediately, would read it. Would be brave enough to answer back.
I want to see you again. But maybe not in a café. Maybe somewhere we can talk without trying to pretend we're strangers.
I'm scared. But I've realized that I've been scared my whole life, so I might as well be scared of something that matters.
Come to the parking garage under the department store on Friday at eight o'clock. I'll tell them to expect you. You can come up to the rooftop level. It's private. It's empty after hours.
I want to talk to you without a book in front of my face. I want to know if we can exist together without words written down first.
Lily holds the notebook and understands: this is the moment where everything becomes real. Where they step out of the margins and into the actual world.
She writes back in the notebook:
I'm terrified.
But yes. Yes, I'll come.
The parking garage is ugly in that particular way of Seoul parking garages: fluorescent lights, painted concrete, the smell of car exhaust and moisture. She parks on the roof level and sees him immediately. He's standing near the edge, looking out at the city.
When she gets out of the car, he turns. His baseball cap is off now. He's wearing dark hair longer than she expected, and his face is so familiar from photographs she's never seen but somehow knows exactly—because she's read it in his handwriting, in the shape of his words, in the careful self-awareness of his punctuation.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi," he says.
Neither of them moves.
"I was going to say something profound," she says, "but I think I'm too scared."
"Me too," he says. "I've been planning this conversation for a week and I've forgotten every word I wanted to say."
He steps closer.
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
"Yes."
"Are you disappointed? That I'm real?"
He looks at her for a long moment. Really looks at her.
"No," he says. "The opposite. You're even more real than I expected. You're more thoughtful. More careful. The way you move, the way you're standing—you're exactly the person who would read a stranger's notebook and answer back with empathy instead of judgment."
"I don't even know your name," she says.
"I know."
"Should I?"
"Not yet," he says. "I think I need a little longer in this space where you just know me as the person I really am, and not as whatever version of me exists out there in the world."
She nods. Steps closer.
"What happens now?" she asks.
"I think," he says carefully, "we talk. For real. We use our voices instead of our hands. We see if the person in the notebook and the person in the real world are the same person, or if one of us is a carefully constructed lie."
"And if we're not?" she asks.
"Then we've had a beautiful story that lasted about two months. And that's enough. That's more than most people get."
But she sees him say this while looking at her like he doesn't believe it at all. Like he's hoping, desperately, that they're the same person. That the words match the voice match the face match the way she breathes.
"I'm Lily," she says.
He pauses. Like he's about to tell her his name. Like he wants to, but he's holding it back, keeping the last secret safe.
"It's nice to meet you, Lily," he says finally.
"You too," she says. "I wish I had a name to use."
"You can call me..." He thinks. "You can call me whatever you want. Something private. Something only you know."
"Okay," she says. "I'm going to call you James."
It's a risk. If she's wrong, he'll correct her. If she's right, he might panic.
Instead, he smiles. A small smile, barely there, but real.
"James," he says. "I like that. It's not my name, but it feels like it could be."
They talk for three hours.
They stand on the parking garage roof while the city gets dark around them. Seoul spreads out below them like a circuit board lit up with electricity. She tells him about her family, really tells him, not just the fragments she left in the margins. He tells her about growing up between countries, about the specific exhaustion of existing in multiple languages, about what it felt like to realize at fifteen that his life was never going to be normal.
They talk about music and literature and what it means to create something when you're not sure you're creating from yourself or from some constructed version of yourself anymore.
"I'm scared," he says at one point, "that I've become a hollow thing. That underneath the performance, there's nothing. Just mirrors reflecting other people's expectations back at them."
"That's not true," she says. "I've read everything you've written. There's something real underneath. Something so real that it hurts."
"How do you know?"
"Because real things hurt," she says. "False things are smooth and easy. But you're complicated. You contradict yourself. You want things that are impossible. You've written about loving people and hating them at the same time. That's not performance. That's being human."
He looks at her like she's just given him permission to exist.
"Can I touch you?" he asks. "Is that okay?"
"Yes," she says.
He reaches out slowly and takes her hand. Her hand is cold from the winter air, and his is warmer. They stand like this, holding hands on a parking garage roof in Seoul, while the city lights reflected in his eyes look almost bearable.
"We have to be careful," he says. "About this. About us. Once people know, everything changes. This space we've built—it becomes public. It becomes something I can't control."
"I know," she says.
"People will feel entitled to an opinion about you. About us. They'll want to know things, predict things, make it into a story they can control."
"I know," she says.
"And I have a life that's very complicated. I have a group. I have obligations. I have people depending on me. Adding you to that—it's a risk."
"I know," she says again. "But I think I'm worth it."
He steps closer and kisses her. It's soft, careful, the kind of kiss that's asking permission rather than taking it. It's the kiss of someone who's been writing about intimacy for so long that actually being intimate feels impossible.
When he pulls back, he says: "You are. You absolutely are."
After that, they exist in a strange space between secret and secret.
They don't meet in public very often—the risk is too high. Instead, they develop a system. They still write, still leave letters in the bookstore, but they also text sometimes, from encrypted numbers. They talk on the phone late at night, sitting in their respective rooms, speaking very quietly so no one can hear.
He tells her about his group. About Martin, who sees through him in a way that's terrifying. About Juhoon, who sits beside him in silence and somehow that's more comforting than any conversation. About Seonghyeon and Keonho, who are like brothers but not quite, because there's always that distance that comes from being coworkers first and friends second.
She tells him about her classes, about her professor who keeps asking her what she's writing because he can see something's changed in her work—there's more passion in it now, more vulnerability. She tells him about Mr. Lee, who has stopped asking if everything is okay and has just started giving her more hours, trusting her with the bookstore in a way that feels like protection.
She starts finding his songs. CORTIS releases a new album in February, and she listens to every song with the knowledge that some of these words came from their conversations. There's a song called "Margins" that's clearly about their correspondence. The lyrics are abstract enough that no one else will understand them, but she hears her own words reflected back to her in the melody.
He writes, in a letter:
I tried to write about you without it being obvious. But I realized that the moment I started writing about anything real, it became obvious because the whole album up to that point was lies. The whole album was designed to be beautiful but empty, and then suddenly there's this song that means something, and the contrast makes it scream.
I'm terrified that people will listen to it and know that something's changed. That I'm not performing anymore. That I'm writing from a real place.
But I'm also not sorry. Because at least it's real. At least one song, on one album, has something true in it.
By April, they've been writing to each other for six months. The notebook by the bookstore is actually a series of notebooks now, stacked in a shelf behind the register. Mr. Lee has stopped asking what they are. He seems to understand that they're important.
Spring has come to Seoul. The cold has loosened its grip. The trees are starting to leaf out. Cherry blossoms have bloomed and fallen, creating pink snow on the sidewalks.
Lily is at the bookstore when a girl comes in—she can't be more than fifteen, with the kind of careful makeup that suggests it's her first year of understanding how to be attractive. She's nervous about something. She browses the shelves uncertainly, as if she's looking for a specific book but doesn't quite know what it is.
Finally, she approaches the counter.
"Do you have," she says carefully, "letters? Like, books of letters? Between people?"
Lily's heart rate spikes.
"What kind of letters?" she asks carefully.
"Letters that are like—" the girl struggles for the words, "—letters where someone is trying to figure out who they are. And someone else is helping them understand. Like, letters where there's love but it's not... it's not physical, it's like love through language?"
Lily could sell her the letters of Rilke and Clara Westhoff. The letters of Frida and Diego. The letters of people in love through distance.
Instead she asks: "Why are you looking for these?"
"Because," the girl says, "my bias has changed. He used to be the one who was just there, you know? Like, he was fine. But something shifted a few months ago, and now every time he talks—even when he's just singing or being silly—I can see something real underneath. Like, he's not performing as much. And it's like I'm falling in love with him for the first time, but in a different way. Not as a celebrity. As a person. And I want to understand what that means."
Lily stares at this girl.
"I think," she says slowly, "you've figured something out. Something really important. And I think the letters you're looking for aren't about other people. They're about learning how to love something real underneath the performance."
The girl nods like this makes perfect sense.
"I know it's sad," she says. "Because he probably has someone already. The way he's different—it's not about his fans. It's about one person. I can feel it. But I'm glad, anyway. I'm glad because it means he's not alone."
After the girl leaves—with a book of Pablo Neruda's love letters—Lily sits at the counter and cries quietly.
Because the secret is starting to show. Because his change is noticeable enough that fans can sense it. Because they're running out of time before this becomes something bigger than two people writing in the margins of a notebook.
She writes him that night:
Someone came into the bookstore today. A young fan, maybe fifteen. She could see that you're different. She could feel that something changed. And I thought about how much longer we can keep this secret before it becomes too big to hide.
I'm not saying we should tell people. I'm not ready for that either. But I'm saying that we're running out of time in this space we've built. And I'm afraid of what happens when the outside world finds out.
Are you afraid too?
He writes back the next day:
Yes. I'm terrified. But I've also realized something: I'm already living in the world as a different person. I'm already not performing as much. I'm already showing people parts of me that I didn't use to show. So maybe it doesn't matter how long we keep the secret. Maybe the damage—or the gift, depending on how you look at it—is already done.
And maybe that's okay. Maybe it has to be okay, because the alternative is going back to being hollow, and I can't do that anymore. You've made it impossible for me to be empty again.
I think I'm ready to tell people I'm in love. I don't think I'm ready to tell them who I'm in love with. But I think I can do the first part. And see what happens from there.
The revelation doesn't come the way they planned.
It comes through Seonghyeon.
Seonghyeon, who keeps hundreds of half-finished songs on his laptop. Seonghyeon, who likes movies and jazz and overanalyzing things at 2 a.m. Seonghyeon, who notices everything.
He notices that James is different. He notices that James is humming new melodies that aren't part of any song they're working on. He notices that James smiles sometimes when he thinks no one is looking. And he notices, eventually, that James's phone always buzzes with messages late at night, and James always leaves the room to respond.
One day, Seonghyeon just asks him:
"Are you in love?"
James, who's never been good at lying to people who know him, just says: "Yes."
"With who?"
"I can't tell you."
"Do they know who you are?"
James doesn't answer, which is answer enough.
"Oh my god," Seonghyeon says. "You're in love with someone who doesn't know you're you."
"I was in love with someone who knew me through my words before they knew me through my face," James corrects. "That's different."
"Is it?"
"Yes. Because it means they love me for something real, not for the shape of my career."
Seonghyeon considers this. And then he does something that only a real friend would do—he decides to keep the secret. But he also decides to help.
Because Martin is starting to ask questions. Because other members are noticing that James is writing more, seeming more peaceful, less trapped in his own head. Because they're all smart enough to know that something has shifted, and they're smart enough to understand that it's something good.
Seonghyeon becomes the cover. When James leaves to meet Lily, Seonghyeon tells the others they're working on music. When James stays up late texting, Seonghyeon doesn't mention it. When James comes back with that particular softness around his eyes that comes from being loved and returning it, Seonghyeon just nods like it's completely normal.
In May, James takes Lily to an empty practice room in the CORTIS building. It's late at night. Everyone else has gone home. There's just the two of them and the massive mirror and the sound of Seoul's traffic far below.
He plays her something he's been working on. A song that's entirely different from anything CORTIS would release. It's personal. It's about memory and longing and the strange intimacy of language. It's about falling in love with someone's mind before understanding their face.
When he finishes, Lily is crying.
"It's beautiful," she says.
"It's about you," he says.
"I know."
"But it's also about me. About us. About what we've built together."
He sets down his guitar and takes her hand.
"I want to keep doing this," he says. "I want to keep writing songs about real things. I want to keep existing in the world as someone who's in love, even if I can't tell people with who. Because the truth will come out eventually, and when it does, I want to be already living as an honest person. I want the lie to be as small as possible."
"When do you think it will come out?" Lily asks.
"Soon," he says. "Weeks. Maybe months. But soon. Because Martin is definitely about to figure it out, and once Martin knows, the rest of the group will know, and once they know, it's only a matter of time before someone connected to CORTIS, someone who works at the company, someone who sees us together—it's only a matter of time before the secret escapes."
"Are you ready?" she asks.
"No," he says. "But I don't think I have a choice."
He kisses her. And this time it's not careful. It's desperate, like he's trying to memorize her, like he's afraid of forgetting what this feels like in the space between secret and revelation.
PART THREE: EXPOSURE
III. THE REVELATION
The secret breaks in the way secrets always do: suddenly, and from an unexpected angle.
It's not Martin. It's not Seonghyeon. It's a photographer at a café near Ewha Womans University.
Someone takes a picture of James and Lily sitting at a corner table, not touching, but leaning toward each other in a way that's unmistakably intimate. Someone who doesn't recognize him as James Zhao from CORTIS, who just sees an interesting composition—a man and woman in deep conversation on a spring afternoon. Someone who sells that photograph to a entertainment news website.
The headline reads: "CORTIS Member James Spotted with Unknown Woman—New Romance?"
It's everywhere within hours.
Reddit. Twitter. The comment sections of Korean news outlets. Telegram. TikTok. Everywhere people congregate to discuss celebrities, the image is already spreading. Zoomed in on. Enhanced. Analyzed.
James calls Lily while she's in her literature seminar.
"It's out," he says. "They have a photo."
Her stomach drops.
"What do we do?" she asks.
"I don't know. I'm calling the company. I'm calling Martin. I'm—" He stops. Takes a breath. "I'm going to tell them the truth. About you. Not about the notebook yet—that can be our secret—but that I'm in a relationship with you. That you're important. That this is real."
CORTIS, as a group, is known for being unusually honest. They don't have a carefully crafted narrative about every member's personal life the way other idol groups do. They've given interviews about their struggles, about their insecurities, about the difficulty of balancing individual identity with group identity.
So when the company calls an emergency press conference, people expect chaos, denial, or a carefully constructed lie.
What they don't expect is honesty.
James stands in front of cameras and says: "I'm in a relationship. I chose not to make it public because I wanted to protect the person I'm with. But now that the photo is out there, I want to be clear about something: this person is important to me. This is not a scandal. This is my life. This is me existing as a real person with real relationships."
He pauses.
"And I'm tired of existing as anything other than a real person."
The reaction is instant and overwhelming.
Some fans are supportive. Some are devastated—they've built fantasies around him being available, and reality shatters that. Some accuse him of being a player, of using Lily, of violating her privacy. Some call for boycotts. Some create fanart of him and Lily together, imagining a relationship they've actually never seen.
The media tries to identify her. Someone in Lily's university figures it out—she's been acting strange, disappearing frequently, and now there's this girl who went to a café at the exact time a CORTIS member was photographed at a café.
Within twenty-four hours, Lily's name is public.
Within forty-eight hours, someone has found her Instagram, her background, her family. Someone has pieced together that she works at a bookstore. Someone, inevitably, will find the bookstore.
Lily's phone is ringing constantly. Her family is calling, worried and confused. Her professors are asking if she's okay. Random people on the internet are trying to add her on social media, demanding information about her relationship with James.
She turns off her phone.
Goes to the bookstore, where Mr. Lee is watching the news on a small television he keeps in the back room.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't mean for this to happen."
"Sit down," Mr. Lee says. "I'll make you tea."
They sit in the back room while the news plays in the background. CORTIS is being discussed. A new angle surfaces: the timing of James's emotional evolution. Someone notices the shift in his lyrics. Someone suggests he's been working through a relationship in his music for months. Someone finds the song "Margins" and starts analyzing it, wondering if it's about the mystery woman.
"You love him," Mr. Lee says. It's not a question.
"Yes," Lily says. "But I think I loved him more when he was just a voice in my head. I think I loved him more when he was anonymous."
"That's true," Mr. Lee says, "for most people. The reality always damages the fantasy. But sometimes the reality is better in ways you couldn't have imagined."
"Is it?" Lily asks.
"I don't know," Mr. Lee says honestly. "I was in love once. Many years ago. She chose someone else. I never found out why, and I've spent decades creating beautiful reasons that are probably entirely false. Some days I think if I'd actually known her, the reality would have destroyed the fantasy. Other days I think that avoiding the reality was the biggest mistake I made."
"Which is it?" Lily asks. "Which would you choose now?"
Mr. Lee smiles sadly. "I would choose the reality. I would choose the disappointment and the beautiful parts and the messiness of actually being with her. Even if it destroyed the fantasy, it would be real. And real, even when it's terrible, is better than beautiful lies."
James tries to protect her.
He asks the company to make a statement: Lily Parker is not a public figure and should not be subjected to harassment. He asks his fans to respect her privacy. He does multiple interviews where he emphasizes that she's not responsible for his choices, that she didn't know who he was when they met, that she didn't pursue him for his fame.
None of this helps. If anything, it makes it worse, because now everyone is desperate to know her story. The mysterious woman who changed Korea's hottest idol. The girl who made CORTIS's James write honest songs. The bookstore girl who stole a celebrity's heart.
She becomes a character in someone else's narrative.
And Lily, who has spent her entire life trying to be invisible, suddenly becomes the most visible person in her world.
Two weeks after the photo is released, Lily gets a message from an anonymous account. She almost doesn't open it. But there's something in the username that catches her attention—it references one of the books in the poetry section of the bookstore.
The message is from a CORTIS fan.
I know you probably don't want to hear from fans, but I needed to tell you something. I realized who you were from the description James gave in interviews—literature student, works at a bookstore, quiet person who notices things. I'm a big fan, and I've spent the last two weeks absolutely devastated. Because I love James, and I felt like he was choosing you over us. Choosing one person's love over millions of people's love. And I was angry.
But then I read some interviews, and I heard him talk about what it means to be real versus being performed. And I realized something. You haven't taken James away from us. You've given him back to us. Because now when we listen to CORTIS, we're not listening to a beautiful lie. We're listening to a real person who's brave enough to be honest.
And I realized that I love him more now, because I finally get to love a real person instead of a fantasy I created. So I just wanted to say—thank you. Thank you for being the person who made him brave enough to be real.
Lily reads this three times, crying.
She shows James.
"There are more like this," James says. "The ratio of supportive to unsupportive is actually climbing. People are coming around."
"Are they?" Lily asks. "Or are they just the nicest ones who are the most vocal?"
"Probably both," James admits. "But the nice ones are real. The people who get it, who understand what we did—they're real, and they're starting to be louder than the people who just want me to disappear."
By June, the noise has quieted to a manageable level.
Not because the public has lost interest—celebrity gossip is eternal—but because new scandals emerge. A government official is caught in a corruption scandal. Another idol group breaks up. The news cycle moves on, and James and Lily are yesterday's headlines.
They still can't walk in public without a high level of risk. But the immediate danger has passed. People are getting used to the idea of them existing together.
Lily returns to the bookstore. She doesn't hide behind the counter anymore. She works normally, talks to customers, recommends books. Some customers recognize her. Most just treat her like a normal person, which is both better and worse.
James stops by late one evening after a concert. It's May-turning-into-June, and Seoul is warm and humid in that particular way that makes people move slower. He's exhausted. The concert was good—the fans were loud, supportive, maybe even more vocal than usual, more present in their enthusiasm now that they know he's in love, now that his love has become part of the narrative.
"I want to tell you something," he says, sitting in the reading chair by the window.
"Okay," Lily says, pulling up a stool.
"I want to get an apartment. Together. I want to have a space that's ours, where we don't have to hide. Not from the public necessarily—though we can if we want—but from the secrecy. I'm tired of existing in stolen hours."
"What about the group?" Lily asks.
"What about them?" James says. "They love you. Martin has taken to texting you questions about music. Seonghyeon is basically planning your life with you at this point. Juhoon just sits near you and seems peaceful. And Keonho—" he smiles, "—Keonho has been taking bets on how long before you move in."
"Your company," Lily says carefully, "they're okay with this?"
"They're okay with whatever keeps me stable and working. And I'm more stable now than I've been in years. So yes. They're fine with it."
Lily considers this. Six months ago, she was a literature student working part-time at a bookstore. Now she's the girlfriend of one of the most famous people in Korea. Now she exists in the public sphere whether she wanted to or not.
"Okay," she says. "Let's do it."
They find an apartment in a quiet part of Seoul, far from the entertainment district. It's small, with high ceilings and good light. There's a window that looks out onto a tree. The building is mixed residential and business—no one really cares who comes and goes.
They move in at the beginning of July.
The first thing James does is set up a small desk in the corner of the bedroom. Not for work—he has multiple studios for that. But a desk for writing. For letters. For the kind of processing that can only happen on paper.
The second thing Lily does is unpack all her books. The apartment was small, and her books are many, so they end up everywhere—on shelves, stacked on the floor, creating small towers of paper and cardboard.
James just watches her organize them.
"What are you thinking?" she asks.
"I'm thinking that I love you," he says. "And I'm thinking that I can't believe this is real. That we're real."
"Are we?" Lily asks. "Or are we still the people in the notebook, just existing in a different space?"
"I think," James says carefully, "that we're both. We're the people who wrote beautiful things to each other in margins. And we're also people who forget to cook dinner and fight about how to organize books and occasionally annoy each other. We're two versions simultaneously."
"Is that enough?" Lily asks.
"Yes," James says. "Because the first version is why we love each other, and the second version is what makes it real."
That August, they do something neither of them planned.
James is at the apartment, writing in the notebook—they still write to each other, even though they're living together, even though they see each other every day. The writing has become not about communication anymore but about recording moments, creating a permanent archive of their love.
He writes about the way Lily looks in the morning when she's just woken up. About the time she sat on the kitchen floor at 2 a.m. eating ice cream and crying because she was overwhelmed by finally being visible in the world. About watching her teach a literature seminar (she's started helping at her university) and seeing her light up when a student finally understands something she's been trying to explain.
She writes back:
I watched you today from the recording studio window. You were working with the others, and you were completely present, completely there. I realized that I fell in love with a person who existed mostly inside his own head, and now I get to watch that person out in the world, sharing that inner life with people. It's like watching a butterfly you've been keeping in a chrysalis finally open its wings. Except the butterfly is you, and the chrysalis was my arms, and I'm not sure if I'm sad or happy about that.
James reads this and decides: they need to tell the story.
Not for the public. Not for fans. But for themselves. They need to write down how this happened. How two people fell in love through margins and letters. How anonymity became revelation. How secret became something shared.
He talks to Lily about it.
"I want to write a book," he says. "Or I want you to write a book. Or I want us to write a book together. About this. About how we found each other."
"That's insane," Lily says. "That's like inviting everyone into the most private thing we've ever done."
"I know. But I think it's also important. I think our story means something. Not because we're famous or because people are interested. But because we're an example of something—of falling in love with words before faces. Of intimacy through language. Of the strange way that people can know each other completely while not knowing each other at all."
"People will use it," Lily says. "They'll mine it for details about you. They'll speculate. They'll judge."
"I know," James says. "But they're already doing that. At least this way, they'd be doing it with accurate information. At least this way, we'd be telling our own story instead of letting other people make it up."
Lily thinks about this for a long time. She thinks about the girl who came into the bookstore looking for books of letters. She thinks about the fan who wrote her the kind message. She thinks about all the people who are trying to understand what it means to love someone real instead of a fantasy.
"Okay," she says. "But we do it the right way. We write it like literature, not like a celebrity memoir. We make it beautiful. We make it matter as a story, not just as gossip."
"I know exactly what you mean," James says.
PART FOUR: INTEGRATION
IV. BECOMING VISIBLE
The book takes them eight months to write.
They work on it together, trading chapters, editing, rewriting. James writes about what it was like to be an idol trying to disappear into himself. Lily writes about what it was like to read a stranger's loneliness and feel less alone. Together, they write about the correspondence, the meetings, the revelation, the integration of secret and public life.
They don't publish it immediately. They let it sit for a while. They show it to people they trust—Seonghyeon, who cries reading it. Martin, who says it's the most honest thing he's ever encountered from James. Lily's parents, who finally understand what happened and why their daughter is happy in a way that doesn't make sense from the outside but makes perfect sense once you understand the inside.
By the time they're ready to publish, it's March of the following year.
The book is called "Letters to a Stranger." It's published by a small literary publisher known for beautiful work. It's not marketed as a celebrity memoir—it's marketed as a contemporary romance novel with elements of epistolary narrative. Most people who read it don't realize it's true until they're halfway through.
The reaction is unexpected.
It becomes a bestseller not because James is famous, but because the story is true in a way that most stories aren't. Because people read about Lily's experience of finding the notebook and think: I've wanted to be found like that. Because they read about James's exhaustion and think: I've felt that, that specific loneliness of being seen but not known. Because they read about the correspondence and think: I've always felt like letters were more honest than conversation.
The book wins a literature prize. Reviewers compare it to classics of epistolary fiction. Creative writing professors start assigning it to students. Bookstores—including the bookstore near Sinchon where it all began—create displays dedicated to it.
Two years after the notebook first appeared on the bookstore floor, Lily and James are sitting in a university lecture hall.
Lily's creative writing professor has assigned "Letters to a Stranger" to the class. She's organized for both authors to come speak.
There are easily two hundred people in the auditorium. Some are students in the class. Others are random people who just heard about the event. Some are fans of James, though fewer than there would have been five years ago. Some are people who've read the book and just wanted to see the real people.
The professor asks: "When you were writing the correspondence, did you know it would become a book?"
"No," Lily says. "I thought it would be a secret we took to our graves. I thought the whole point was that it existed in that space between us and nowhere else."
"And now?" the professor asks.
"Now I'm grateful we told it," Lily says. "Because I realized that the only reason I was embarrassed or protective of it was because it was mine. Because I was trained to think that private means hidden. But stories want to be told. They want to reach people. And our story—it's not just ours anymore. It belongs to every person who's felt alone and hoped that someone would understand."
James adds: "When I first started writing in that notebook, I was writing to disappear. To become less visible to myself. And then Lily answered, and I realized that being seen—truly seen, without the performance—was better than being invisible. So now we wanted to model that for other people. Wanted to show that it's possible to be known."
The questions go on for hours. Some are about the book. Some are about CORTIS. Some are about celebrity and privacy. Some are about the notebook itself—Mr. Lee has donated it to a literary museum, and people want to know if they can see it.
But the question that matters comes from a girl in the back who raises her hand hesitantly, like she's not sure she's allowed to ask.
"Did the story turn out the way you wanted it to?"
Lily and James look at each other.
"No," James says. "It turned out better. Because real life is always bigger than what you expect."
"But also scarier," Lily adds. "More painful sometimes. More joyful other times. Less controllable. But yes—better."
After the event, they walk home through Seoul.
It's spring again. Another spring. The trees are budding. The weather is turning warm. The city is doing that thing it does where it simultaneously reveals itself and hides itself, beautiful and lonely in the same breath.
"Do you regret it?" James asks. "Making it public?"
"Some days," Lily says honestly. "On the days when strangers approach me on the street. On the days when I see someone online saying horrible things about us. On the days when I remember that I chose visibility when I could have stayed invisible."
"And other days?"
"Other days I think about the girl in the bookstore who came looking for letters, and I think: we gave her something. We showed her that love through language is real. We showed her that you can fall in love with someone's mind before you fall in love with their face. We showed her that the most intimate thing two people can do is truly see each other."
They walk in silence for a while.
"I want to ask you something," James says. "We've been together for almost two years now. We've lived together for a year. We've written a book. We've exposed the most vulnerable parts of ourselves to the world. And I feel like there's one more thing."
He pulls out a box.
Lily stops walking.
"Are you—"
"Yes," he says. "I'm asking you to marry me. Not tomorrow. Not because of the book or the public pressure. But because I want to spend the rest of my life being the person I become when I'm with you. Because you've taught me that being known is better than being famous. Because I want to keep writing letters to you for the rest of our lives, and I want those letters to have the permanence of marriage behind them."
Lily takes the ring. It's not ostentatious—it's simple, elegant, with a stone that catches the spring light.
"Yes," she says. "Yes, absolutely yes."
They get married the following autumn.
The wedding is small, intimate, held in a garden near the bookstore where it all began. They invite the group—Martin, Juhoon, Seonghyeon, Keonho. They invite Mr. Lee, who sits in the front row looking like he's finally received an answer to a question he's been asking for years. They invite Lily's family, who are no longer baffled by their daughter's choices but have integrated them into their understanding of her as someone who lives deeply in the world of language and emotion.
There are no press photographers. They've negotiated privacy for this one moment. There are no fans camped outside. This is just two people making a public commitment to each other, witnessed by people they love.
James writes vows that are actually a letter he reads aloud:
Dear Lily,
When I first met you on the rooftop of a parking garage, I thought I was meeting the person who'd saved my life by reading my words. But now I realize you saved me by giving me permission to be real. Before you, I thought being real meant being flawed, weak, unworthy of the position I'd managed to occupy in the world. But you've taught me that being real means being brave. It means choosing truth over safety, vulnerability over armor, presence over performance.
I want to spend my life writing to you. I want to fill notebooks with observations about the way you look when you're reading, the way you laugh at jokes only you understand, the way you make the smallest moments into something that matters. I want to grow old with someone who understands that intimacy isn't always physical—sometimes it's just being known so completely that you can sit in perfect silence and feel loved.
I promise to keep writing. I promise to keep being real. I promise to love not just the version of you I discovered in words, but every version of you that emerges as we live our lives together.
Forever yours, James
Lily's vows are simpler:
James, you taught me that the most beautiful thing two people can do is understand each other. You taught me that being seen is not dangerous if you're being seen by someone who loves you completely. You taught me that words can be more intimate than touch, that silence can be more honest than speech, that falling in love slowly, line by line, is the deepest kind of falling in love.
I promise to keep reading you. I promise to keep writing to you. I promise to love the real person you've become, not the person I imagined in those margins. I promise to exist with you—really exist, completely exist, not hiding anything—for as long as we both shall live.
And I promise to do one more thing: I promise to keep wondering at the miracle of you, of us, of the fact that a lost notebook brought us together and changed both our lives forever.
EPILOGUE: FIVE YEARS LATER
The bookstore near Sinchon has become a literary landmark.
Not because anything famous has happened there, but because something real happened there. Something true. And people are drawn to places where truth happens.
The notebook is displayed in a climate-controlled case—all of them, all the notebooks, stacked carefully together like a physical representation of a conversation that spanned months and changed two people irrevocably. People come from all over Seoul, from all over Korea, from other countries, just to look at the original handwriting. To read the first exchange of words. To understand how love can happen in margins.
Mr. Lee is officially retired, though he still comes in three times a week and sits in the reading chair, watching customers discover the notebooks. He's written his own book now, a collection of essays about what it means to run a bookstore, to bear witness to people's relationships with language and story and the past.
Lily and James have a daughter. Her name is Emma, after the novel that Lily's mother loves. She's three years old, and she's inheriting her parents' love of words. She carries notebooks around the apartment, scribbling in them, not understanding yet that the marks mean something, but understanding instinctively that marking the pages is important.
CORTIS by this time had separated and gone their own ways.
Not because of Lily. Not because of fame or burnout or any of the reasons people assumed. But because he realized that he wanted to make music that was just his. Music that didn't have to be group-approved or public-appropriate. He releases songs sporadically now, independently, and each one is a letter to Lily in the form of melody.
Lily teaches creative writing at the university. Her syllabus always includes "Letters to a Stranger," and her students always recognize it as the one book where the love story feels real. She's working on a novel of her own—a piece of fiction that grew out of the practice of writing in notebooks, of falling in love through fragments and observations.
On the afternoon of the fifth anniversary of Lily finding the notebook, they go back to the bookstore together.
Emma is with her grandmother. It's just Lily and James, the people the secret created.
They sit in the reading chair by the window. The chair where Lily first found the notebook. Where James first sat when he came to the café. Where they've sat countless times in the years since, writing and reading and existing in the space between word and life.
"Do you remember," Lily asks, "when you first wrote 'who are you?'"
"I do," James says. "I was terrified. I thought I'd scared you away forever."
"You almost did," Lily says. "But then I realized that being scared of being known was scarier than being known itself."
James pulls out a notebook. It's fresh, unmarked. He hands it to her with a pen.
"What's this?" she asks.
"Our next story," he says. "I thought we should write about what it's been like. The marriage. Emma. Growing into these lives we've built. I thought we should keep the tradition going."
Lily opens the notebook to the first page. Writes:
Five years later, and I still can't believe he's real. That any of it is real. That we took something that happened in secret and turned it into something that matters to thousands of people. That we built a life out of fragments and letters.
But I'm beginning to understand that this is what love is. This is what it means to be known and to know someone back. This is the silence between words, the space where intimacy lives.
She hands him the notebook. He reads. Smiles. Writes beneath her words:
I'm beginning to understand, too. That we didn't find each other by accident. That notebooks can carry love the way they carry words. That some stories don't end when you stop writing them—they just transform into the next chapter.
I love you, Lily. In words. In silence. In every moment we exist together.
He closes the notebook gently.
They sit in the reading chair by the window as the afternoon light begins to shift, turns golden, transforms the bookstore into something like a dream. Outside, Seoul continues its particular magic—hiding and revealing itself simultaneously, lonely and full, real and impossible.
The notebook sits closed between them.
A promise. A record. A beginning disguised as a continuation.
And somewhere in the city, a girl is thinking about what it means to fall in love without knowing someone's face. Another girl is reading "Letters to a Stranger" and recognizing her own loneliness in Lily's words. Another person is sitting in a café, writing to a stranger, believing in the possibility of being known.
The story continues.
Not in words anymore.
But in the lives people choose to build around the words that saved them.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This novel was inspired by Shunji Iwai's 1995 film "Love Letter," which explores memory, longing, and the strange intimacy of words written to people we believe are lost to us. It was also inspired by every person who has ever felt more known by a stranger's words than by the people they live with.
This is a love story about falling in love with a mind before a face. About the real intimacy of being understood. About how the most profound relationships are sometimes the ones that happen almost entirely through language.
It is dedicated to everyone who has ever felt invisible and believed that someone, somewhere, might be able to see them.
They might be closer than you think.
They might be writing, right now, in the margins of a notebook, trying to find the words to reach you.
[p.s also writing cortis seperation BROKE my heart pls that was so hard HELP]
SYNOPSIS! When Lily Parker discovers a worn notebook abandoned at a secondhand bookstore, she finds herself reading the intimate, unsent letters of a stranger—someone processing loneliness, burnout, and the fear of disappearing beneath performance. She writes a response in the margin without thinking. He writes back. What unfolds is a profound love story told entirely through handwritten fragments, where two people fall in love with each other's minds long before they know each other's names. But when their secret is exposed and his identity as a member of the country's biggest idol group is revealed, Lily and James must decide whether their love—built on anonymity and silence—can survive becoming visible to the world.
tags! inspired by love letter - a japanese movie, contemporary romance, epistolary novel, slow-burn, seoul, literary fiction, found notebook, anonymous correspondence, intimacy through language, secret relationship, quiet heartbreak, falling in love with words, celebrity romance, unreliable performance vs authentic self, happy ending though so don't worry, set in 1995.
comfort fic :)
PART ONE: WINTER
I. THE BOOKSTORE
The secondhand bookstore near Sinchon smells like old paper, dust, and the particular sadness of forgotten things. Lily Parker likes this smell. She likes the way light falls through the front window at three in the afternoon, catching dust motes that look like tiny constellations. She likes how the store is never quite warm enough, so customers keep their coats on, moving through the aisles like ghosts haunting a place they once belonged.
It's December. Seoul is doing that thing it does in winter—becoming somehow both more beautiful and more lonely. The streets narrow under gray sky. People walk faster, shoulders hunched against the cold. Neon signs reflect off wet pavement. Steam rises from street vendor carts and café windows, fogging the glass with brief, temporary warmth.
Lily works three afternoons a week at the bookstore, shelving returns and alphabetizing donations. The owner, Mr. Lee, is a quiet man in his seventies who seems content to let the store exist as a kind of peaceful accident. He trusts Lily to organize things her own way, which means the stock follows no strict system—contemporary fiction near philosophy, poetry stacked horizontally across the top of self-help books, translations scattered like seeds through every section. Customers often can't find what they're looking for, but they always find something.
Today is one of those days where the light is particularly beautiful and also particularly depressing. Lily stands on a stepladder, returning books to the poetry section, when she notices something unusual on the floor near the reading chairs by the window.
A notebook.
Not a nice notebook—not one of those expensive journals with leather bindings and blank pages that cost more than a week's worth of coffee. This one is worn, the spine cracked, the cover a faded dark blue that might have once been navy. The edges of the pages are soft from handling, slightly yellowed. There's coffee staining the bottom corner.
Lily picks it up. It's warm, as if someone has just set it down.
She opens it carefully, the way you'd open something very old.
The pages are filled with handwriting. Not neat handwriting—not the careful penmanship of someone conscious of being observed. This is the handwriting of someone writing alone, at odd hours, thoughts moving faster than the hand can catch them. Some words are pressed so hard into the paper they nearly tear through. Others are so light they're barely visible, as if the writer was already half-asleep.
Lily reads the first page:
I don't know why I'm writing this. There's no one to send it to. There's no one who should read it. But if I don't write it, I think it will keep circling in my head until I forget what it originally felt like, and then I'll be left with just the pale ghost of the feeling, which is worse than not feeling at all.
She closes the notebook gently. Sets it on the counter.
She should find out who it belongs to. There might be a name inside, contact information. But first, she works until six o'clock, and by then the store is empty except for Mr. Lee, who is reading a newspaper in the back room with a cup of green tea that has probably gone cold.
"Someone left this," Lily says, placing the notebook on the counter.
Mr. Lee glances at it over his glasses. Adjusts them. Looks again.
"Did they come back?" he asks.
"Not while I was here."
"Leave it on the counter. If they remember, they'll come looking."
Lily nods, but she doesn't leave it on the counter. Instead, she places it on the shelf behind the register, where it won't be easily visible but also won't be lost. She tells herself this is practical. It's easier to keep track of lost items this way.
This is a small lie she tells herself, and she knows it.
The truth is: she's curious.
The notebook stays behind the register for three days.
No one comes looking for it. Lily thinks about it constantly. During her morning classes—a lecture on Victorian literature that she only half-listens to because she's thinking about the handwriting on page one. During lunch, when she sits in the university library's reading room and tries to finish an essay about narrative unreliability. During her walk home through the cold Seoul evening, when she passes ajummas bundled in puffy coats and young couples sharing earbuds, and she thinks: someone is missing this. Someone is looking for this.
Or: maybe someone is relieved to have lost it.
On the fourth day, a Saturday, when the bookstore is busier than usual—a few scattered customers, a girl studying in the corner, an older man browsing the history section—Lily finally allows herself to open the notebook again.
She opens it to a random page. Reads:
I performed for fifteen thousand people last night. Did the same choreography I've done a thousand times. Hit the same mark on stage. Smiled at the camera. Everything was perfect. Technically perfect. I watched the footage this morning and I looked like a real person doing real things, and I remember being there, in my body, but I also remember being somewhere else. Watching myself from far away. Like I was in the audience watching someone who looks exactly like me.
When I got home, I couldn't remember what any of the songs felt like anymore.
Lily sits down slowly in the reading chair by the window. The December light is fading—it's only three in the afternoon but already the sun is sinking, painting the sky that specific color of winter that exists nowhere else in the world.
She turns to the next page:
I think the problem is that I became famous by accident. I don't think I was supposed to. I think somewhere in another timeline, I'm just a normal person, and in that version of my life, I remember what music feels like without having to think about the choreography simultaneously. I remember what it feels like to be bored. That sounds like a small thing, but boredom means your mind is yours. Once you stop owning your own mind, you stop owning very much.
I wonder what that version of me is doing right now.
There's a small illustration in the margin. A rough sketch of what might be a person sitting on a bench, or maybe just sitting. It's drawn so lightly it's barely there.
Lily closes the notebook. Opens it again. She shouldn't be reading this. This is someone's privacy, someone's loneliness, and she's intruding on it. But she also can't seem to stop.
She reads about trainee days. About a friend named Juhoon. About the particular exhaustion of learning dance at four in the morning when your body has stopped responding to commands and your brain has stopped making sense of your limbs. About watching older members debut, and the feeling of being left behind, and then the shock of being chosen, and then the shock of how hollow being chosen can feel when there are cameras recording the hollow moment.
She reads about songs that never made it onto albums. About the lyric that took six months to write correctly. About the lyrics that are so personal they can never be released because anyone who knew you would recognize themselves in the lines, and then they'd know you wrote about them, and then everything would be ruined.
The handwriting changes throughout the notebook. Some sections are careful and controlled. Others are almost indecipherable, as if the writer was angry or crying while writing, or both.
There are sketches. Mostly small, mostly barely-there. A coffee cup. A window. A profile of a face she doesn't recognize. Numbers that might be dates. Song fragments that look like lyrics but aren't quite coherent.
And then, roughly halfway through the notebook, Lily finds a section dated almost a month ago:
I went to the concert yesterday. The whole group. It was a small thing, a university thing, nothing official. But I stood at the back and I watched people—not the musicians, just the people in the audience—and I realized that we give them something. Not just entertainment. We give them a place to exist outside of time for a while. We give them permission to feel things intensely in the dark. And that's a real thing. That matters. I know it matters because I saw this girl—I don't know her age, maybe college-aged, maybe younger—and she was crying, and the tears were real, and she was crying because something someone else had written and performed had made her feel brave enough to be sad in public.
So maybe it's okay that parts of me are disappearing. If the parts I'm losing are being given to other people. If pieces of my loneliness are becoming pieces of their bravery.
That's not a small trade.
There's a long silence after this entry. Then, a few pages later, in handwriting that looks slightly different—or maybe the same handwriting at a different time of day, a different mood—a single line:
I want to write something that matters. Not something famous. Just something that matters to one person. Something that makes one person feel less alone.
The entry is unfinished.
Lily reads this line several times. She reads it so many times that she nearly memorizes it, which means she's already started carrying it with her, already started making it hers.
She should return this notebook immediately. She knows this. There might be a way to identify the person—she could check social media, ask customers, post about it online. The responsible thing would be to try.
Instead, she slides the notebook into the empty shelf space behind the register again.
And tomorrow, or the next day, she thinks, she will write a response.
She doesn't know why she thinks this. The impulse doesn't make sense. Whoever wrote these words isn't asking for a response. They don't know anyone will ever read them. They're writing into silence.
But Lily has spent her entire life reading the words of strangers. Books are filled with people speaking across time and death and distance. The most intimate conversations she's ever had are with writers who've been dead for a hundred years. Why shouldn't she answer back?
She tells herself this is just an extension of being a reader.
This is a second small lie, and a bigger one.
She waits until Monday.
The bookstore is quiet on Monday afternoons. Mr. Lee usually leaves early to attend something—Lily has never asked what, and he's never volunteered the information. This is the kind of relationship they have: companionable, undemanding, happy to exist in parallel without requiring constant explanation.
By two o'clock, Lily is alone.
She brings the notebook out from behind the register. Sets it on the counter. Finds a pen—a nice pen, not just any pen, but one she actually likes, with dark blue ink that writes smoothly. She's borrowed it from the drawer where Mr. Lee keeps writing supplies for customers who want to leave notes inside books.
She thinks for a long time about what to write.
She opens the notebook to the last unfinished entry:
I want to write something that matters. Not something famous. Just something that matters to one person. Something that makes one person feel less alone.
And in the margin, very carefully, in handwriting she tries to make as neat as possible (though she knows she'll never be really neat, her hand naturally leans forward, eager, the words always slightly rushed), she writes:
You already have.
She draws a very small bracket around the words. Steps back. Stares at what she's done.
It's a small thing. Four words. She's just told a stranger that their private writing, their secret loneliness, has already touched someone. That someone read their unfinished thought and felt less alone because of it.
This is a very dangerous thing to have written.
She almost erases it. Her hand hovers over the pen, ready to scratch the words into illegibility.
But she doesn't.
Instead, she closes the notebook. Returns it to the shelf. And tells herself that this is the end of it. This is the completion of a small moment of human connection that will now fade back into silence, which is how it should be.
She genuinely believes this, for exactly twenty-three hours.
On Tuesday, when she opens the bookstore at noon and retrieves the notebook from the shelf, she sees that something has appeared beneath her four words:
Who are you?
Lily doesn't answer immediately.
She takes the notebook home to her small studio apartment in a building near Ewha Womans University, far from the noise of Sinchon but close enough to get there by bus. The apartment is the size of a generous closet. A bed, a desk, a shelf for books, a window that looks out onto an alley where old ajummas hang laundry. She keeps the apartment very clean because there's nowhere for disorder to hide.
She sits on her bed—the only place to sit besides her desk—and holds the notebook.
The fact that the person has written back changes everything. This is no longer a one-sided act of intrusion. This is an opening. An invitation. A conversation that is now, undeniably, happening.
Who are you? is a question without an easy answer.
She could write her name. But her name would reduce her to a searchable person—a Google image, a social media profile, a fixed identity. Right now she is just a voice. A reader. A stranger who understood something true about the words she read.
She could write: Someone who reads. Someone who listens.
But that's vague to the point of being dismissive.
She could write nothing. Return the notebook to the shelf and wait to see what happens.
Instead, she writes:
I'm the person who found your notebook. I'm not returning it because I think maybe you meant for someone to find it. And maybe you meant for them to answer.
I can't tell you who I am yet. But I can tell you that what you wrote is true. That you've already written something that matters.
She adds: You're not as alone as you think.
Then, because she doesn't want the tone to be entirely serious, she adds beneath this:
Also, the coffee stain on page 47 is a nice touch. Very literary.
She finds page 47. There is indeed a coffee stain. It bleeds across a section where the handwriting is so light it's almost invisible.
She closes the notebook. Walks it back to the bookstore that evening, slipping it onto the shelf behind the register when Mr. Lee is in the back room.
Then she waits.
The replies come back within two days.
You're right. I think some part of me knew someone would find it. Some part of me maybe wanted someone to find it. But knowing that and having it happen are different things.
Can you tell me anything about who you are? Anything at all?
And thank you about the coffee. I was sad that day and I think I spilled it on purpose.
Lily reads this three times. The honesty of it—I think I spilled it on purpose—undoes something in her careful distance.
She writes back:
I study literature. I work at a bookstore. I like reading about the things people don't say out loud. I notice details that other people miss. I'm the kind of person who reads the same sentence multiple times just because the way the words fit together makes me feel something I can't quite explain.
I like that you spilled it on purpose. I like that you're honest about it.
And I like that you already knew someone would find this.
She pauses. Then adds:
What were you sad about? On the day you spilled the coffee?
This is crossing a line. This is no longer just offering comfort to a stranger. This is asking them to be known. This is the beginning of the conversation becoming real.
She writes the response carefully and returns the notebook to the shelf. For the next three days, she can barely concentrate in class. She finds herself thinking about what the answer will be. What kind of sadness would make someone spill coffee on purpose? What kind of sadness would make someone want to see the mark of it, preserved in the pages of their own private thoughts?
When she returns to the bookstore on Thursday, her hands are actually shaking as she reaches for the notebook.
The response is long. Pages long. So long that the pen changes partway through, suggesting it was written across multiple days:
I was sad about lots of things. I'm always sad about lots of things, in that ambient way where you stop noticing it and then suddenly you notice it all at once and it's so heavy you can't stand up. But specifically that day, it was about a conversation I had. Someone I care about said something that made me realize I've changed so much that they don't recognize me anymore. They looked at me like I was a stranger wearing someone they loved. And I wanted to tell them that I'm still me, somewhere underneath, but I couldn't find the place where I'm still me. So I spilled coffee on purpose because at least that's a real thing. At least I did something that mattered, even if it was just making a mess.
The reason I'm telling you this is because you asked. And because somehow, writing to you—to this voice I don't know, that doesn't have a face or a name attached to it—it's easier than actually talking to the people around me.
Is that sad? Or is that a relief?
I think it might be both.
Below this, in much smaller handwriting, almost a whisper on the page:
I want to keep writing to you. Is that okay?
Lily sits down in the reading chair. The chair by the window where she found the notebook, where she first read the strangers' loneliness. The December light is not beautiful today—the sky is completely overcast, gray from edge to edge. The city has turned monochrome.
She buys a coffee from the café next door. Deliberately chooses something hot that might stain. Sits with the notebook and writes:
It's both. It's entirely both.
And yes. Yes, of course it's okay. I want to keep writing to you too.
Can I ask you something though? Is this real? Are you really sad about being unrecognizable? Or are you writing what you think people want to read?
She holds her breath after she writes this. She's just accused this person of being dishonest. She's just suggested they're not to be trusted.
But she watches as, over the next few days, the responses come back, and they're the most honest thing anyone has ever written to her:
I asked myself this question for a while. Whether I'm always performing, even when I'm alone. Even when I think no one is looking.
But I think the answer is no. Not when I'm writing to you. With you, I don't have to be anyone. I don't have to be recognizable. I can just be confused and lonely and trying to figure out who I am underneath everything else.
Is that dishonest because I wouldn't say these things out loud to anyone? Or is it the most honest thing because I'm saying them at all?
I think I'm not sure.
But I know that when I'm writing these words, I'm being real. Whatever that means.
And then, a few days later, in a handwriting that looks like it was written very quickly, almost frantically:
I'm sorry. That was probably too intense. I'm not very good at this. At talking to people. At being honest. At admitting that I need something from someone else.
I think I scared you away.
Lily reads this at three in the morning, lying in bed, unable to sleep. She gets up. Goes to her desk in the cold darkness. Opens her laptop and messages Mr. Lee:
I'm coming in early tomorrow. Is that okay?
He responds within minutes, though it's the middle of the night:
Everything alright?
Yes. I just need to be at the bookstore.
In the morning, before the sun is fully up, Lily is at the bookstore. She opens the notebook and writes:
You didn't scare me away. You made me realize that I'm scared of something else entirely. I'm scared that I've been alone for so long that I've stopped knowing how to be known. I'm scared that if someone actually saw me—the real me, not the version I perform as—they'd leave.
But then I read your words, and I thought: what if being unknown is scarier than being abandoned?
What if the point of finding each other, even in silence, even in writing, even between pages, is exactly this—this moment where we stop performing and start being real?
I didn't scare away. I'm still here. I'm right here.
She closes the notebook carefully. Waits.
By the afternoon, when she returns from her morning classes, the response is already there:
I think I'm falling in love with you. I think I fell in love with you the moment you wrote "You already have." And I know that's crazy because I don't know who you are. I don't know your name or what you look like or anything real about you except the way your mind works and the way you write and the fact that you read my words like they mattered.
But they do matter. And so do you.
Lily stands in the quiet bookstore, the notebook trembling slightly in her hands, and realizes: she's fallen in love too.
The correspondence intensifies.
They write almost daily now, sometimes multiple times a day. Lily will slip into the bookstore between classes and find a new entry waiting. She'll respond immediately, waiting until evening to return the notebook to the shelf. Other customers come and go. Mr. Lee nods at her distracted presence. The world continues, but it feels small and distant, like watching something through a foggy window.
She learns things. Not his name—they've both agreed to maintain that anonymity, this beautiful silence where he exists as just a voice, and she exists as just a consciousness receiving his words. But she learns his rhythms. She learns that he writes at odd hours: 4 a.m., or late at night after performances, or during long waits in airports. The handwriting varies depending on his state of mind—sometimes rushed and almost angry, sometimes so careful it looks like calligraphy.
She learns that he has siblings he doesn't live with. That he was born in one country and grew up in another and now lives in a third. That he speaks languages she doesn't, and sometimes writes phrases in languages she has to guess at—she looks them up later, sits in the university library with a translation app and a notebook of her own, trying to decode his multilingual loneliness.
She learns that he has a best friend who knows him better than anyone, even though his best friend doesn't know who he really is beneath the performance. She learns that his work is music, but that music has become difficult because work changed it. She learns that he's terrified of what will happen to the people he loves if they get too close to him, because fame is a kind of contagion that infects everything.
And he learns things about her.
She tells him about her parents, who wanted her to study something practical and were baffled by her choice to move to Seoul to study literature. She tells him about the evening her mother asked her what job she was training for, and Lily realized her mother couldn't fathom a life built on reading and understanding beauty. She tells him about the feeling of being perpetually misunderstood, of having to pretend to be someone else—someone practical, someone with direction, someone who fits into the world—just to be tolerated.
She tells him that she's lonely in Seoul, even though the city has millions of people. That she comes to the bookstore because it's the only place where being interested in sad things is encouraged. That she underlines sentences in books not because she's trying to study but because she needs to mark the moments where another human, dead or alive, managed to say something true about what it means to exist.
She tells him that until she found his notebook, she'd started to believe that being understood was a luxury only available in fiction.
He writes back:
I think maybe that's where I was wrong. I thought being understood was dangerous. That if someone knew me, really knew me, they could hurt me. But being unknown is its own kind of hurt. Being seen as a symbol instead of a person, being loved by thousands of people who love an idea of you instead of you—that's a kind of loneliness that no crowd can touch.
And then you started writing, and I realized that this—this conversation, this being known slowly, through language, through fragments—maybe this is the only way I can actually be known. Not all at once, not with my face attached, not with everything on display. But slowly. Line by line. Until finally there's an entire person visible, constructed from nothing but words.
I want to know you like this forever. I want to write to you every day for the rest of my life and never know your real name.
Lily reads this and thinks: this is insane. This is the most insane and beautiful thing that has ever happened to her.
She writes:
Then let's do that. Let's make this a whole life. Let's construct a world where we only exist in these margins and these responses. Let's be the people we really are, but only to each other. Let's live in this notebook like it's a home.
I love you. I don't know how or why, because I don't know who you are. But I've never been more certain of anything.
Below this, she adds: Come to the bookstore. Not to meet me—I'm not ready for that, and I don't think you are either. But come sometimes. Sit in the reading chair by the window. Leave the notebook. Let me sit in that same chair and read your words, knowing you just sat there. Let's haunt the same space.
He writes back after three days:
I came today. I sat in the chair. I was terrified. I felt like if I breathed too loud you would know exactly who I was. I rewrote the same entry seventeen times before I left it for you.
Here's what I want to tell you: the world is so small that it's a miracle we found each other. And it's so big that we probably live within a few kilometers of each other right now, in this cold December city, and we don't even know. We could pass each other on the street. We could sit next to each other on the subway. We could stand in the same coffee shop and order from the same barista and have no idea that we're looking at the person who knows us best.
That thought terrifies me. But it also makes me feel brave. Because somehow, against impossible odds, we found each other anyway. Not through accident. Through something that felt like fate the moment I read your handwriting on my page.
I love you too. And I'm not ready to know your name either. But I think some part of me is ready to know the shape of you in the world, even if I don't know the name attached to that shape.
Lily reads this in the reading chair, exactly where he sat when he wrote it. She can imagine it—him, sitting in this very place, breathing carefully, rewriting words, trying to express something so real it could break if spoken aloud. She holds the notebook and feels like she's holding his hand across time, across silence, across the careful distance they've constructed between the truth and the telling of it.
December turns into January.
The city gets colder. Snow falls in Seoul, which is rare. The bookstore becomes something like a refuge—a place where winter can't quite touch, where dust motes and old paper create a kind of warmth that no radiator can provide.
They develop a rhythm. She'll leave entries about her days—details of her morning walk, a conversation overheard on the bus, a poem she read that made her cry. He'll respond with his own observations, parallel moments of loneliness that feel like echoes of hers, or sometimes direct answers, sometimes tangents into philosophy or music theory or the particular sadness of being misunderstood.
He writes about a concert he performed. About standing on stage and forgetting, for a moment, why he was there. About the moment when he remembered and the performance became real again. About the contradiction of thousands of people looking at you while you feel completely alone.
She writes about attending a concert—not his, she doesn't say, but he understands—and watching him from far away, understanding that everyone in the crowd was loving a version of him, and only she knew the real him, the one who wrote in margins and thought about disappearing and was terrified of being recognized.
He writes:
I saw you in the crowd. I'm not sure which person you were, but I felt you. I felt like maybe my eyes found you across fifteen thousand people, and for a moment, I wasn't performing. I was just seeing. And I think I was seeing you.
After the concert, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Someone in that crowd knows who I really am. Someone in that crowd loves me not for what I did on stage but for what I wrote in secret.
That thought got me through the next four shows.
By late January, they've written nearly a hundred pages.
The notebook is full now. Lily and he have used every margin, every blank space. Some pages are layered with writing—his responses written over her responses written over his original entries, creating palimpsests of conversation that are almost impossible to read but beautiful to look at. The handwriting changes constantly. Sometimes she writes in blue pen, sometimes pencil. He writes in black and gray and sometimes in red ink, which makes the words look urgent, like they need to be read immediately.
They're running out of space.
He writes on the very last blank page—the inside back cover:
We need to decide what happens now. Do we start a new notebook? Do we meet and become real people to each other, which feels like it will ruin everything? Or do we end here, leaving this as a perfect archive of a love that only existed in words?
I can't tell you what the right answer is, but I can tell you that I'm not ready to stop. I'm not ready to know your name, to see your face, to have you become a person I might be disappointed by. I'm not ready to translate this beautiful silence into the messy reality of actually being together.
But I also can't keep going like this. It's becoming painful in a different way now. The joy of writing to you is being mixed with the desperation of not knowing who you are, not being able to touch you, not being able to exist with you in the real world.
Tell me what you want to do. And whatever you decide, I'll accept it. Even if you decide to disappear. Even if you decide that this was just a beautiful dream and you want to wake up.
But I hope you don't. I hope you want the same thing I want, which is to keep going, somehow. Even if it's terrifying.
Lily reads this on a Monday evening, sitting in her apartment, and she knows that this is the moment where everything changes.
She goes to the bookstore the next morning, before her first class. It's very early, and Mr. Lee hasn't arrived yet, but he gave her a key months ago, trusting her with the space the way she's learned he trusts most people—completely and without explanation.
She stands in the empty bookstore. The dawn light is just beginning to filter through the windows. The store is full of shadows and the smell of old paper. She places her hand on the spine of a book and thinks about how she wants her life to be.
Then she sits down and pulls out a fresh notebook—a beautiful one, expensive, with handmade paper that has a slight texture that feels almost like skin. She'll buy it later, pay for it from her wages. Right now she's just using it.
She writes:
I want to know you. But I don't want to know your name yet. I don't want to Google you or see your face. I want to keep this mystery for a while longer.
But I want to know the shape of you. I want to know how you move through the world. I want to sit beside you and read your words knowing that you're sitting beside me, even if we're not quite looking at each other.
So here's what I propose: we meet, but we don't reveal our identities. We keep writing, but we also start speaking. I want to know what your voice sounds like. I want to know if we're comfortable in silence together the way we are on the page.
There's a café near the bookstore. It's small, tucked away, not the kind of place celebrities go. We could meet there. You could bring a book. I'll bring a book. We could sit at different tables if you want. We could pretend we're strangers who happen to be reading near each other. And after, we can come back here, to the bookstore, and leave each other letters about what it felt like to finally exist in the same physical space.
It's not perfect. It's probably not even wise. But I think I need to know if you're real in the world, not just in these pages.
If you want this, come to the café on Thursday at three o'clock. Order something. Sit by the window. Read. I'll be there too.
She closes the notebook. Leaves it on the counter for him to find.
And then she waits to see if her heart is about to be broken, or if it's about to become real.
PART TWO: RECOGNITION
II. THE CAFÉ
On Thursday at two-forty-five, Lily stands outside the café. It's small, older, the kind of place that serves expensive coffee and has exactly six tables. The window is slightly steamed from the warmth inside, creating a barrier between the cold afternoon and the comfort within.
She's wearing her best sweater. She's brushed her hair. She's done all the things that people do when they want to be presentable, which is ridiculous because she's also committed to not being recognized, not being known in the traditional sense. But she wants him to look at her, when he enters, and see something worth knowing.
She pushes open the door. Sits at a table with a good view of the entrance. Orders an Americano, even though she hates Americano, because it seems like the kind of drink a serious person would order.
At three o'clock exactly, a man enters.
Lily's breath catches.
He's tall. He's wearing dark clothes and a baseball cap pulled low. He's looking at his phone, trying to appear casual, but there's something in the way he moves that suggests he's very aware of every person in the café. He orders something—she doesn't hear what—and sits at the table diagonally across from her, the angle awkward enough that if they're not careful they won't even really see each other.
They both open their books.
He's reading poetry in Korean. She can see it clearly, the pages are thin and delicate.
She's reading a novel in English, something about heartbreak, something she picked because she thought it was appropriately on-the-nose.
Neither of them reads.
Lily stares at the same paragraph for fifteen minutes and doesn't absorb a single word. She's terrified. She's also exhilarated. This person, the person who's written all those words, who's told her his deepest fears and smallest joys, is sitting across from her. He's real. He has a face and hands and a way of sitting and a baseball cap that he's pushed a little too far down his head, possibly because he's trying to hide from someone.
She looks up, deliberately.
He's looking at her.
Their eyes meet, and she sees immediate recognition. He knows. Not who she is—not by face or name or any identifying feature—but he knows that she's the person. He can see it somehow. Can feel it across the distance.
He looks away quickly. Takes a sip of his coffee.
She looks back down at her book.
Neither of them moves for another ten minutes.
Then, very carefully, he stands up. Leaves a bill for his untouched coffee. Walks to the exit. Pauses at the door. And without looking back, he places a small piece of paper on the shelf beside the door, tucked between a plant and the wall, somewhere someone would have to be looking for it to find it.
He leaves.
Lily counts to fifty. Then she closes her book. Gets up. Retrieves the paper.
It's a single line, written in his handwriting:
It's really you. And somehow, I knew the moment I saw you.
She finds him at the bookstore that evening.
Not as a customer. He's brought a new notebook—the one she bought, the one with the handmade paper. He's left it on the counter, and inside the front cover, he's written:
I've been thinking about you so much that I was afraid to sit in the same room and breathe the same air, because I thought maybe you'd realize you don't actually like me. That the person in the notebook is carefully constructed, and the person in real life is just a tired man in a baseball cap trying not to be recognized.
But then I saw you, and you looked exactly the way I imagine you would look. Thoughtful. Careful. Slightly worried. The kind of person who would find a notebook and instead of returning it immediately, would read it. Would be brave enough to answer back.
I want to see you again. But maybe not in a café. Maybe somewhere we can talk without trying to pretend we're strangers.
I'm scared. But I've realized that I've been scared my whole life, so I might as well be scared of something that matters.
Come to the parking garage under the department store on Friday at eight o'clock. I'll tell them to expect you. You can come up to the rooftop level. It's private. It's empty after hours.
I want to talk to you without a book in front of my face. I want to know if we can exist together without words written down first.
Lily holds the notebook and understands: this is the moment where everything becomes real. Where they step out of the margins and into the actual world.
She writes back in the notebook:
I'm terrified.
But yes. Yes, I'll come.
The parking garage is ugly in that particular way of Seoul parking garages: fluorescent lights, painted concrete, the smell of car exhaust and moisture. She parks on the roof level and sees him immediately. He's standing near the edge, looking out at the city.
When she gets out of the car, he turns. His baseball cap is off now. He's wearing dark hair longer than she expected, and his face is so familiar from photographs she's never seen but somehow knows exactly—because she's read it in his handwriting, in the shape of his words, in the careful self-awareness of his punctuation.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi," he says.
Neither of them moves.
"I was going to say something profound," she says, "but I think I'm too scared."
"Me too," he says. "I've been planning this conversation for a week and I've forgotten every word I wanted to say."
He steps closer.
"Can I ask you something?" she says.
"Yes."
"Are you disappointed? That I'm real?"
He looks at her for a long moment. Really looks at her.
"No," he says. "The opposite. You're even more real than I expected. You're more thoughtful. More careful. The way you move, the way you're standing—you're exactly the person who would read a stranger's notebook and answer back with empathy instead of judgment."
"I don't even know your name," she says.
"I know."
"Should I?"
"Not yet," he says. "I think I need a little longer in this space where you just know me as the person I really am, and not as whatever version of me exists out there in the world."
She nods. Steps closer.
"What happens now?" she asks.
"I think," he says carefully, "we talk. For real. We use our voices instead of our hands. We see if the person in the notebook and the person in the real world are the same person, or if one of us is a carefully constructed lie."
"And if we're not?" she asks.
"Then we've had a beautiful story that lasted about two months. And that's enough. That's more than most people get."
But she sees him say this while looking at her like he doesn't believe it at all. Like he's hoping, desperately, that they're the same person. That the words match the voice match the face match the way she breathes.
"I'm Lily," she says.
He pauses. Like he's about to tell her his name. Like he wants to, but he's holding it back, keeping the last secret safe.
"It's nice to meet you, Lily," he says finally.
"You too," she says. "I wish I had a name to use."
"You can call me..." He thinks. "You can call me whatever you want. Something private. Something only you know."
"Okay," she says. "I'm going to call you James."
It's a risk. If she's wrong, he'll correct her. If she's right, he might panic.
Instead, he smiles. A small smile, barely there, but real.
"James," he says. "I like that. It's not my name, but it feels like it could be."
They talk for three hours.
They stand on the parking garage roof while the city gets dark around them. Seoul spreads out below them like a circuit board lit up with electricity. She tells him about her family, really tells him, not just the fragments she left in the margins. He tells her about growing up between countries, about the specific exhaustion of existing in multiple languages, about what it felt like to realize at fifteen that his life was never going to be normal.
They talk about music and literature and what it means to create something when you're not sure you're creating from yourself or from some constructed version of yourself anymore.
"I'm scared," he says at one point, "that I've become a hollow thing. That underneath the performance, there's nothing. Just mirrors reflecting other people's expectations back at them."
"That's not true," she says. "I've read everything you've written. There's something real underneath. Something so real that it hurts."
"How do you know?"
"Because real things hurt," she says. "False things are smooth and easy. But you're complicated. You contradict yourself. You want things that are impossible. You've written about loving people and hating them at the same time. That's not performance. That's being human."
He looks at her like she's just given him permission to exist.
"Can I touch you?" he asks. "Is that okay?"
"Yes," she says.
He reaches out slowly and takes her hand. Her hand is cold from the winter air, and his is warmer. They stand like this, holding hands on a parking garage roof in Seoul, while the city lights reflected in his eyes look almost bearable.
"We have to be careful," he says. "About this. About us. Once people know, everything changes. This space we've built—it becomes public. It becomes something I can't control."
"I know," she says.
"People will feel entitled to an opinion about you. About us. They'll want to know things, predict things, make it into a story they can control."
"I know," she says.
"And I have a life that's very complicated. I have a group. I have obligations. I have people depending on me. Adding you to that—it's a risk."
"I know," she says again. "But I think I'm worth it."
He steps closer and kisses her. It's soft, careful, the kind of kiss that's asking permission rather than taking it. It's the kiss of someone who's been writing about intimacy for so long that actually being intimate feels impossible.
When he pulls back, he says: "You are. You absolutely are."
After that, they exist in a strange space between secret and secret.
They don't meet in public very often—the risk is too high. Instead, they develop a system. They still write, still leave letters in the bookstore, but they also text sometimes, from encrypted numbers. They talk on the phone late at night, sitting in their respective rooms, speaking very quietly so no one can hear.
He tells her about his group. About Martin, who sees through him in a way that's terrifying. About Juhoon, who sits beside him in silence and somehow that's more comforting than any conversation. About Seonghyeon and Keonho, who are like brothers but not quite, because there's always that distance that comes from being coworkers first and friends second.
She tells him about her classes, about her professor who keeps asking her what she's writing because he can see something's changed in her work—there's more passion in it now, more vulnerability. She tells him about Mr. Lee, who has stopped asking if everything is okay and has just started giving her more hours, trusting her with the bookstore in a way that feels like protection.
She starts finding his songs. CORTIS releases a new album in February, and she listens to every song with the knowledge that some of these words came from their conversations. There's a song called "Margins" that's clearly about their correspondence. The lyrics are abstract enough that no one else will understand them, but she hears her own words reflected back to her in the melody.
He writes, in a letter:
I tried to write about you without it being obvious. But I realized that the moment I started writing about anything real, it became obvious because the whole album up to that point was lies. The whole album was designed to be beautiful but empty, and then suddenly there's this song that means something, and the contrast makes it scream.
I'm terrified that people will listen to it and know that something's changed. That I'm not performing anymore. That I'm writing from a real place.
But I'm also not sorry. Because at least it's real. At least one song, on one album, has something true in it.
By April, they've been writing to each other for six months. The notebook by the bookstore is actually a series of notebooks now, stacked in a shelf behind the register. Mr. Lee has stopped asking what they are. He seems to understand that they're important.
Spring has come to Seoul. The cold has loosened its grip. The trees are starting to leaf out. Cherry blossoms have bloomed and fallen, creating pink snow on the sidewalks.
Lily is at the bookstore when a girl comes in—she can't be more than fifteen, with the kind of careful makeup that suggests it's her first year of understanding how to be attractive. She's nervous about something. She browses the shelves uncertainly, as if she's looking for a specific book but doesn't quite know what it is.
Finally, she approaches the counter.
"Do you have," she says carefully, "letters? Like, books of letters? Between people?"
Lily's heart rate spikes.
"What kind of letters?" she asks carefully.
"Letters that are like—" the girl struggles for the words, "—letters where someone is trying to figure out who they are. And someone else is helping them understand. Like, letters where there's love but it's not... it's not physical, it's like love through language?"
Lily could sell her the letters of Rilke and Clara Westhoff. The letters of Frida and Diego. The letters of people in love through distance.
Instead she asks: "Why are you looking for these?"
"Because," the girl says, "my bias has changed. He used to be the one who was just there, you know? Like, he was fine. But something shifted a few months ago, and now every time he talks—even when he's just singing or being silly—I can see something real underneath. Like, he's not performing as much. And it's like I'm falling in love with him for the first time, but in a different way. Not as a celebrity. As a person. And I want to understand what that means."
Lily stares at this girl.
"I think," she says slowly, "you've figured something out. Something really important. And I think the letters you're looking for aren't about other people. They're about learning how to love something real underneath the performance."
The girl nods like this makes perfect sense.
"I know it's sad," she says. "Because he probably has someone already. The way he's different—it's not about his fans. It's about one person. I can feel it. But I'm glad, anyway. I'm glad because it means he's not alone."
After the girl leaves—with a book of Pablo Neruda's love letters—Lily sits at the counter and cries quietly.
Because the secret is starting to show. Because his change is noticeable enough that fans can sense it. Because they're running out of time before this becomes something bigger than two people writing in the margins of a notebook.
She writes him that night:
Someone came into the bookstore today. A young fan, maybe fifteen. She could see that you're different. She could feel that something changed. And I thought about how much longer we can keep this secret before it becomes too big to hide.
I'm not saying we should tell people. I'm not ready for that either. But I'm saying that we're running out of time in this space we've built. And I'm afraid of what happens when the outside world finds out.
Are you afraid too?
He writes back the next day:
Yes. I'm terrified. But I've also realized something: I'm already living in the world as a different person. I'm already not performing as much. I'm already showing people parts of me that I didn't use to show. So maybe it doesn't matter how long we keep the secret. Maybe the damage—or the gift, depending on how you look at it—is already done.
And maybe that's okay. Maybe it has to be okay, because the alternative is going back to being hollow, and I can't do that anymore. You've made it impossible for me to be empty again.
I think I'm ready to tell people I'm in love. I don't think I'm ready to tell them who I'm in love with. But I think I can do the first part. And see what happens from there.
The revelation doesn't come the way they planned.
It comes through Seonghyeon.
Seonghyeon, who keeps hundreds of half-finished songs on his laptop. Seonghyeon, who likes movies and jazz and overanalyzing things at 2 a.m. Seonghyeon, who notices everything.
He notices that James is different. He notices that James is humming new melodies that aren't part of any song they're working on. He notices that James smiles sometimes when he thinks no one is looking. And he notices, eventually, that James's phone always buzzes with messages late at night, and James always leaves the room to respond.
One day, Seonghyeon just asks him:
"Are you in love?"
James, who's never been good at lying to people who know him, just says: "Yes."
"With who?"
"I can't tell you."
"Do they know who you are?"
James doesn't answer, which is answer enough.
"Oh my god," Seonghyeon says. "You're in love with someone who doesn't know you're you."
"I was in love with someone who knew me through my words before they knew me through my face," James corrects. "That's different."
"Is it?"
"Yes. Because it means they love me for something real, not for the shape of my career."
Seonghyeon considers this. And then he does something that only a real friend would do—he decides to keep the secret. But he also decides to help.
Because Martin is starting to ask questions. Because other members are noticing that James is writing more, seeming more peaceful, less trapped in his own head. Because they're all smart enough to know that something has shifted, and they're smart enough to understand that it's something good.
Seonghyeon becomes the cover. When James leaves to meet Lily, Seonghyeon tells the others they're working on music. When James stays up late texting, Seonghyeon doesn't mention it. When James comes back with that particular softness around his eyes that comes from being loved and returning it, Seonghyeon just nods like it's completely normal.
In May, James takes Lily to an empty practice room in the CORTIS building. It's late at night. Everyone else has gone home. There's just the two of them and the massive mirror and the sound of Seoul's traffic far below.
He plays her something he's been working on. A song that's entirely different from anything CORTIS would release. It's personal. It's about memory and longing and the strange intimacy of language. It's about falling in love with someone's mind before understanding their face.
When he finishes, Lily is crying.
"It's beautiful," she says.
"It's about you," he says.
"I know."
"But it's also about me. About us. About what we've built together."
He sets down his guitar and takes her hand.
"I want to keep doing this," he says. "I want to keep writing songs about real things. I want to keep existing in the world as someone who's in love, even if I can't tell people with who. Because the truth will come out eventually, and when it does, I want to be already living as an honest person. I want the lie to be as small as possible."
"When do you think it will come out?" Lily asks.
"Soon," he says. "Weeks. Maybe months. But soon. Because Martin is definitely about to figure it out, and once Martin knows, the rest of the group will know, and once they know, it's only a matter of time before someone connected to CORTIS, someone who works at the company, someone who sees us together—it's only a matter of time before the secret escapes."
"Are you ready?" she asks.
"No," he says. "But I don't think I have a choice."
He kisses her. And this time it's not careful. It's desperate, like he's trying to memorize her, like he's afraid of forgetting what this feels like in the space between secret and revelation.
PART THREE: EXPOSURE
III. THE REVELATION
The secret breaks in the way secrets always do: suddenly, and from an unexpected angle.
It's not Martin. It's not Seonghyeon. It's a photographer at a café near Ewha Womans University.
Someone takes a picture of James and Lily sitting at a corner table, not touching, but leaning toward each other in a way that's unmistakably intimate. Someone who doesn't recognize him as James Zhao from CORTIS, who just sees an interesting composition—a man and woman in deep conversation on a spring afternoon. Someone who sells that photograph to a entertainment news website.
The headline reads: "CORTIS Member James Spotted with Unknown Woman—New Romance?"
It's everywhere within hours.
Reddit. Twitter. The comment sections of Korean news outlets. Telegram. TikTok. Everywhere people congregate to discuss celebrities, the image is already spreading. Zoomed in on. Enhanced. Analyzed.
James calls Lily while she's in her literature seminar.
"It's out," he says. "They have a photo."
Her stomach drops.
"What do we do?" she asks.
"I don't know. I'm calling the company. I'm calling Martin. I'm—" He stops. Takes a breath. "I'm going to tell them the truth. About you. Not about the notebook yet—that can be our secret—but that I'm in a relationship with you. That you're important. That this is real."
CORTIS, as a group, is known for being unusually honest. They don't have a carefully crafted narrative about every member's personal life the way other idol groups do. They've given interviews about their struggles, about their insecurities, about the difficulty of balancing individual identity with group identity.
So when the company calls an emergency press conference, people expect chaos, denial, or a carefully constructed lie.
What they don't expect is honesty.
James stands in front of cameras and says: "I'm in a relationship. I chose not to make it public because I wanted to protect the person I'm with. But now that the photo is out there, I want to be clear about something: this person is important to me. This is not a scandal. This is my life. This is me existing as a real person with real relationships."
He pauses.
"And I'm tired of existing as anything other than a real person."
The reaction is instant and overwhelming.
Some fans are supportive. Some are devastated—they've built fantasies around him being available, and reality shatters that. Some accuse him of being a player, of using Lily, of violating her privacy. Some call for boycotts. Some create fanart of him and Lily together, imagining a relationship they've actually never seen.
The media tries to identify her. Someone in Lily's university figures it out—she's been acting strange, disappearing frequently, and now there's this girl who went to a café at the exact time a CORTIS member was photographed at a café.
Within twenty-four hours, Lily's name is public.
Within forty-eight hours, someone has found her Instagram, her background, her family. Someone has pieced together that she works at a bookstore. Someone, inevitably, will find the bookstore.
Lily's phone is ringing constantly. Her family is calling, worried and confused. Her professors are asking if she's okay. Random people on the internet are trying to add her on social media, demanding information about her relationship with James.
She turns off her phone.
Goes to the bookstore, where Mr. Lee is watching the news on a small television he keeps in the back room.
"I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't mean for this to happen."
"Sit down," Mr. Lee says. "I'll make you tea."
They sit in the back room while the news plays in the background. CORTIS is being discussed. A new angle surfaces: the timing of James's emotional evolution. Someone notices the shift in his lyrics. Someone suggests he's been working through a relationship in his music for months. Someone finds the song "Margins" and starts analyzing it, wondering if it's about the mystery woman.
"You love him," Mr. Lee says. It's not a question.
"Yes," Lily says. "But I think I loved him more when he was just a voice in my head. I think I loved him more when he was anonymous."
"That's true," Mr. Lee says, "for most people. The reality always damages the fantasy. But sometimes the reality is better in ways you couldn't have imagined."
"Is it?" Lily asks.
"I don't know," Mr. Lee says honestly. "I was in love once. Many years ago. She chose someone else. I never found out why, and I've spent decades creating beautiful reasons that are probably entirely false. Some days I think if I'd actually known her, the reality would have destroyed the fantasy. Other days I think that avoiding the reality was the biggest mistake I made."
"Which is it?" Lily asks. "Which would you choose now?"
Mr. Lee smiles sadly. "I would choose the reality. I would choose the disappointment and the beautiful parts and the messiness of actually being with her. Even if it destroyed the fantasy, it would be real. And real, even when it's terrible, is better than beautiful lies."
James tries to protect her.
He asks the company to make a statement: Lily Parker is not a public figure and should not be subjected to harassment. He asks his fans to respect her privacy. He does multiple interviews where he emphasizes that she's not responsible for his choices, that she didn't know who he was when they met, that she didn't pursue him for his fame.
None of this helps. If anything, it makes it worse, because now everyone is desperate to know her story. The mysterious woman who changed Korea's hottest idol. The girl who made CORTIS's James write honest songs. The bookstore girl who stole a celebrity's heart.
She becomes a character in someone else's narrative.
And Lily, who has spent her entire life trying to be invisible, suddenly becomes the most visible person in her world.
Two weeks after the photo is released, Lily gets a message from an anonymous account. She almost doesn't open it. But there's something in the username that catches her attention—it references one of the books in the poetry section of the bookstore.
The message is from a CORTIS fan.
I know you probably don't want to hear from fans, but I needed to tell you something. I realized who you were from the description James gave in interviews—literature student, works at a bookstore, quiet person who notices things. I'm a big fan, and I've spent the last two weeks absolutely devastated. Because I love James, and I felt like he was choosing you over us. Choosing one person's love over millions of people's love. And I was angry.
But then I read some interviews, and I heard him talk about what it means to be real versus being performed. And I realized something. You haven't taken James away from us. You've given him back to us. Because now when we listen to CORTIS, we're not listening to a beautiful lie. We're listening to a real person who's brave enough to be honest.
And I realized that I love him more now, because I finally get to love a real person instead of a fantasy I created. So I just wanted to say—thank you. Thank you for being the person who made him brave enough to be real.
Lily reads this three times, crying.
She shows James.
"There are more like this," James says. "The ratio of supportive to unsupportive is actually climbing. People are coming around."
"Are they?" Lily asks. "Or are they just the nicest ones who are the most vocal?"
"Probably both," James admits. "But the nice ones are real. The people who get it, who understand what we did—they're real, and they're starting to be louder than the people who just want me to disappear."
By June, the noise has quieted to a manageable level.
Not because the public has lost interest—celebrity gossip is eternal—but because new scandals emerge. A government official is caught in a corruption scandal. Another idol group breaks up. The news cycle moves on, and James and Lily are yesterday's headlines.
They still can't walk in public without a high level of risk. But the immediate danger has passed. People are getting used to the idea of them existing together.
Lily returns to the bookstore. She doesn't hide behind the counter anymore. She works normally, talks to customers, recommends books. Some customers recognize her. Most just treat her like a normal person, which is both better and worse.
James stops by late one evening after a concert. It's May-turning-into-June, and Seoul is warm and humid in that particular way that makes people move slower. He's exhausted. The concert was good—the fans were loud, supportive, maybe even more vocal than usual, more present in their enthusiasm now that they know he's in love, now that his love has become part of the narrative.
"I want to tell you something," he says, sitting in the reading chair by the window.
"Okay," Lily says, pulling up a stool.
"I want to get an apartment. Together. I want to have a space that's ours, where we don't have to hide. Not from the public necessarily—though we can if we want—but from the secrecy. I'm tired of existing in stolen hours."
"What about the group?" Lily asks.
"What about them?" James says. "They love you. Martin has taken to texting you questions about music. Seonghyeon is basically planning your life with you at this point. Juhoon just sits near you and seems peaceful. And Keonho—" he smiles, "—Keonho has been taking bets on how long before you move in."
"Your company," Lily says carefully, "they're okay with this?"
"They're okay with whatever keeps me stable and working. And I'm more stable now than I've been in years. So yes. They're fine with it."
Lily considers this. Six months ago, she was a literature student working part-time at a bookstore. Now she's the girlfriend of one of the most famous people in Korea. Now she exists in the public sphere whether she wanted to or not.
"Okay," she says. "Let's do it."
They find an apartment in a quiet part of Seoul, far from the entertainment district. It's small, with high ceilings and good light. There's a window that looks out onto a tree. The building is mixed residential and business—no one really cares who comes and goes.
They move in at the beginning of July.
The first thing James does is set up a small desk in the corner of the bedroom. Not for work—he has multiple studios for that. But a desk for writing. For letters. For the kind of processing that can only happen on paper.
The second thing Lily does is unpack all her books. The apartment was small, and her books are many, so they end up everywhere—on shelves, stacked on the floor, creating small towers of paper and cardboard.
James just watches her organize them.
"What are you thinking?" she asks.
"I'm thinking that I love you," he says. "And I'm thinking that I can't believe this is real. That we're real."
"Are we?" Lily asks. "Or are we still the people in the notebook, just existing in a different space?"
"I think," James says carefully, "that we're both. We're the people who wrote beautiful things to each other in margins. And we're also people who forget to cook dinner and fight about how to organize books and occasionally annoy each other. We're two versions simultaneously."
"Is that enough?" Lily asks.
"Yes," James says. "Because the first version is why we love each other, and the second version is what makes it real."
That August, they do something neither of them planned.
James is at the apartment, writing in the notebook—they still write to each other, even though they're living together, even though they see each other every day. The writing has become not about communication anymore but about recording moments, creating a permanent archive of their love.
He writes about the way Lily looks in the morning when she's just woken up. About the time she sat on the kitchen floor at 2 a.m. eating ice cream and crying because she was overwhelmed by finally being visible in the world. About watching her teach a literature seminar (she's started helping at her university) and seeing her light up when a student finally understands something she's been trying to explain.
She writes back:
I watched you today from the recording studio window. You were working with the others, and you were completely present, completely there. I realized that I fell in love with a person who existed mostly inside his own head, and now I get to watch that person out in the world, sharing that inner life with people. It's like watching a butterfly you've been keeping in a chrysalis finally open its wings. Except the butterfly is you, and the chrysalis was my arms, and I'm not sure if I'm sad or happy about that.
James reads this and decides: they need to tell the story.
Not for the public. Not for fans. But for themselves. They need to write down how this happened. How two people fell in love through margins and letters. How anonymity became revelation. How secret became something shared.
He talks to Lily about it.
"I want to write a book," he says. "Or I want you to write a book. Or I want us to write a book together. About this. About how we found each other."
"That's insane," Lily says. "That's like inviting everyone into the most private thing we've ever done."
"I know. But I think it's also important. I think our story means something. Not because we're famous or because people are interested. But because we're an example of something—of falling in love with words before faces. Of intimacy through language. Of the strange way that people can know each other completely while not knowing each other at all."
"People will use it," Lily says. "They'll mine it for details about you. They'll speculate. They'll judge."
"I know," James says. "But they're already doing that. At least this way, they'd be doing it with accurate information. At least this way, we'd be telling our own story instead of letting other people make it up."
Lily thinks about this for a long time. She thinks about the girl who came into the bookstore looking for books of letters. She thinks about the fan who wrote her the kind message. She thinks about all the people who are trying to understand what it means to love someone real instead of a fantasy.
"Okay," she says. "But we do it the right way. We write it like literature, not like a celebrity memoir. We make it beautiful. We make it matter as a story, not just as gossip."
"I know exactly what you mean," James says.
PART FOUR: INTEGRATION
IV. BECOMING VISIBLE
The book takes them eight months to write.
They work on it together, trading chapters, editing, rewriting. James writes about what it was like to be an idol trying to disappear into himself. Lily writes about what it was like to read a stranger's loneliness and feel less alone. Together, they write about the correspondence, the meetings, the revelation, the integration of secret and public life.
They don't publish it immediately. They let it sit for a while. They show it to people they trust—Seonghyeon, who cries reading it. Martin, who says it's the most honest thing he's ever encountered from James. Lily's parents, who finally understand what happened and why their daughter is happy in a way that doesn't make sense from the outside but makes perfect sense once you understand the inside.
By the time they're ready to publish, it's March of the following year.
The book is called "Letters to a Stranger." It's published by a small literary publisher known for beautiful work. It's not marketed as a celebrity memoir—it's marketed as a contemporary romance novel with elements of epistolary narrative. Most people who read it don't realize it's true until they're halfway through.
The reaction is unexpected.
It becomes a bestseller not because James is famous, but because the story is true in a way that most stories aren't. Because people read about Lily's experience of finding the notebook and think: I've wanted to be found like that. Because they read about James's exhaustion and think: I've felt that, that specific loneliness of being seen but not known. Because they read about the correspondence and think: I've always felt like letters were more honest than conversation.
The book wins a literature prize. Reviewers compare it to classics of epistolary fiction. Creative writing professors start assigning it to students. Bookstores—including the bookstore near Sinchon where it all began—create displays dedicated to it.
Two years after the notebook first appeared on the bookstore floor, Lily and James are sitting in a university lecture hall.
Lily's creative writing professor has assigned "Letters to a Stranger" to the class. She's organized for both authors to come speak.
There are easily two hundred people in the auditorium. Some are students in the class. Others are random people who just heard about the event. Some are fans of James, though fewer than there would have been five years ago. Some are people who've read the book and just wanted to see the real people.
The professor asks: "When you were writing the correspondence, did you know it would become a book?"
"No," Lily says. "I thought it would be a secret we took to our graves. I thought the whole point was that it existed in that space between us and nowhere else."
"And now?" the professor asks.
"Now I'm grateful we told it," Lily says. "Because I realized that the only reason I was embarrassed or protective of it was because it was mine. Because I was trained to think that private means hidden. But stories want to be told. They want to reach people. And our story—it's not just ours anymore. It belongs to every person who's felt alone and hoped that someone would understand."
James adds: "When I first started writing in that notebook, I was writing to disappear. To become less visible to myself. And then Lily answered, and I realized that being seen—truly seen, without the performance—was better than being invisible. So now we wanted to model that for other people. Wanted to show that it's possible to be known."
The questions go on for hours. Some are about the book. Some are about CORTIS. Some are about celebrity and privacy. Some are about the notebook itself—Mr. Lee has donated it to a literary museum, and people want to know if they can see it.
But the question that matters comes from a girl in the back who raises her hand hesitantly, like she's not sure she's allowed to ask.
"Did the story turn out the way you wanted it to?"
Lily and James look at each other.
"No," James says. "It turned out better. Because real life is always bigger than what you expect."
"But also scarier," Lily adds. "More painful sometimes. More joyful other times. Less controllable. But yes—better."
After the event, they walk home through Seoul.
It's spring again. Another spring. The trees are budding. The weather is turning warm. The city is doing that thing it does where it simultaneously reveals itself and hides itself, beautiful and lonely in the same breath.
"Do you regret it?" James asks. "Making it public?"
"Some days," Lily says honestly. "On the days when strangers approach me on the street. On the days when I see someone online saying horrible things about us. On the days when I remember that I chose visibility when I could have stayed invisible."
"And other days?"
"Other days I think about the girl in the bookstore who came looking for letters, and I think: we gave her something. We showed her that love through language is real. We showed her that you can fall in love with someone's mind before you fall in love with their face. We showed her that the most intimate thing two people can do is truly see each other."
They walk in silence for a while.
"I want to ask you something," James says. "We've been together for almost two years now. We've lived together for a year. We've written a book. We've exposed the most vulnerable parts of ourselves to the world. And I feel like there's one more thing."
He pulls out a box.
Lily stops walking.
"Are you—"
"Yes," he says. "I'm asking you to marry me. Not tomorrow. Not because of the book or the public pressure. But because I want to spend the rest of my life being the person I become when I'm with you. Because you've taught me that being known is better than being famous. Because I want to keep writing letters to you for the rest of our lives, and I want those letters to have the permanence of marriage behind them."
Lily takes the ring. It's not ostentatious—it's simple, elegant, with a stone that catches the spring light.
"Yes," she says. "Yes, absolutely yes."
They get married the following autumn.
The wedding is small, intimate, held in a garden near the bookstore where it all began. They invite the group—Martin, Juhoon, Seonghyeon, Keonho. They invite Mr. Lee, who sits in the front row looking like he's finally received an answer to a question he's been asking for years. They invite Lily's family, who are no longer baffled by their daughter's choices but have integrated them into their understanding of her as someone who lives deeply in the world of language and emotion.
There are no press photographers. They've negotiated privacy for this one moment. There are no fans camped outside. This is just two people making a public commitment to each other, witnessed by people they love.
James writes vows that are actually a letter he reads aloud:
Dear Lily,
When I first met you on the rooftop of a parking garage, I thought I was meeting the person who'd saved my life by reading my words. But now I realize you saved me by giving me permission to be real. Before you, I thought being real meant being flawed, weak, unworthy of the position I'd managed to occupy in the world. But you've taught me that being real means being brave. It means choosing truth over safety, vulnerability over armor, presence over performance.
I want to spend my life writing to you. I want to fill notebooks with observations about the way you look when you're reading, the way you laugh at jokes only you understand, the way you make the smallest moments into something that matters. I want to grow old with someone who understands that intimacy isn't always physical—sometimes it's just being known so completely that you can sit in perfect silence and feel loved.
I promise to keep writing. I promise to keep being real. I promise to love not just the version of you I discovered in words, but every version of you that emerges as we live our lives together.
Forever yours, James
Lily's vows are simpler:
James, you taught me that the most beautiful thing two people can do is understand each other. You taught me that being seen is not dangerous if you're being seen by someone who loves you completely. You taught me that words can be more intimate than touch, that silence can be more honest than speech, that falling in love slowly, line by line, is the deepest kind of falling in love.
I promise to keep reading you. I promise to keep writing to you. I promise to love the real person you've become, not the person I imagined in those margins. I promise to exist with you—really exist, completely exist, not hiding anything—for as long as we both shall live.
And I promise to do one more thing: I promise to keep wondering at the miracle of you, of us, of the fact that a lost notebook brought us together and changed both our lives forever.
EPILOGUE: FIVE YEARS LATER
The bookstore near Sinchon has become a literary landmark.
Not because anything famous has happened there, but because something real happened there. Something true. And people are drawn to places where truth happens.
The notebook is displayed in a climate-controlled case—all of them, all the notebooks, stacked carefully together like a physical representation of a conversation that spanned months and changed two people irrevocably. People come from all over Seoul, from all over Korea, from other countries, just to look at the original handwriting. To read the first exchange of words. To understand how love can happen in margins.
Mr. Lee is officially retired, though he still comes in three times a week and sits in the reading chair, watching customers discover the notebooks. He's written his own book now, a collection of essays about what it means to run a bookstore, to bear witness to people's relationships with language and story and the past.
Lily and James have a daughter. Her name is Emma, after the novel that Lily's mother loves. She's three years old, and she's inheriting her parents' love of words. She carries notebooks around the apartment, scribbling in them, not understanding yet that the marks mean something, but understanding instinctively that marking the pages is important.
CORTIS by this time had separated and gone their own ways.
Not because of Lily. Not because of fame or burnout or any of the reasons people assumed. But because he realized that he wanted to make music that was just his. Music that didn't have to be group-approved or public-appropriate. He releases songs sporadically now, independently, and each one is a letter to Lily in the form of melody.
Lily teaches creative writing at the university. Her syllabus always includes "Letters to a Stranger," and her students always recognize it as the one book where the love story feels real. She's working on a novel of her own—a piece of fiction that grew out of the practice of writing in notebooks, of falling in love through fragments and observations.
On the afternoon of the fifth anniversary of Lily finding the notebook, they go back to the bookstore together.
Emma is with her grandmother. It's just Lily and James, the people the secret created.
They sit in the reading chair by the window. The chair where Lily first found the notebook. Where James first sat when he came to the café. Where they've sat countless times in the years since, writing and reading and existing in the space between word and life.
"Do you remember," Lily asks, "when you first wrote 'who are you?'"
"I do," James says. "I was terrified. I thought I'd scared you away forever."
"You almost did," Lily says. "But then I realized that being scared of being known was scarier than being known itself."
James pulls out a notebook. It's fresh, unmarked. He hands it to her with a pen.
"What's this?" she asks.
"Our next story," he says. "I thought we should write about what it's been like. The marriage. Emma. Growing into these lives we've built. I thought we should keep the tradition going."
Lily opens the notebook to the first page. Writes:
Five years later, and I still can't believe he's real. That any of it is real. That we took something that happened in secret and turned it into something that matters to thousands of people. That we built a life out of fragments and letters.
But I'm beginning to understand that this is what love is. This is what it means to be known and to know someone back. This is the silence between words, the space where intimacy lives.
She hands him the notebook. He reads. Smiles. Writes beneath her words:
I'm beginning to understand, too. That we didn't find each other by accident. That notebooks can carry love the way they carry words. That some stories don't end when you stop writing them—they just transform into the next chapter.
I love you, Lily. In words. In silence. In every moment we exist together.
He closes the notebook gently.
They sit in the reading chair by the window as the afternoon light begins to shift, turns golden, transforms the bookstore into something like a dream. Outside, Seoul continues its particular magic—hiding and revealing itself simultaneously, lonely and full, real and impossible.
The notebook sits closed between them.
A promise. A record. A beginning disguised as a continuation.
And somewhere in the city, a girl is thinking about what it means to fall in love without knowing someone's face. Another girl is reading "Letters to a Stranger" and recognizing her own loneliness in Lily's words. Another person is sitting in a café, writing to a stranger, believing in the possibility of being known.
The story continues.
Not in words anymore.
But in the lives people choose to build around the words that saved them.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
This novel was inspired by Shunji Iwai's 1995 film "Love Letter," which explores memory, longing, and the strange intimacy of words written to people we believe are lost to us. It was also inspired by every person who has ever felt more known by a stranger's words than by the people they live with.
This is a love story about falling in love with a mind before a face. About the real intimacy of being understood. About how the most profound relationships are sometimes the ones that happen almost entirely through language.
It is dedicated to everyone who has ever felt invisible and believed that someone, somewhere, might be able to see them.
They might be closer than you think.
They might be writing, right now, in the margins of a notebook, trying to find the words to reach you.
[p.s also writing cortis seperation BROKE my heart pls that was so hard HELP]
a novel — seoul, late nights, a voice you'd know anywhere
for everyone who has fallen in love with a voice before a face
"It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, meant we were supposed to be together."
SYNOPSIS! Hazel runs a tiny anonymous late-night podcast for insomniacs, and she is very careful not to fall in love with any of her callers — until one keeps coming back. His voice is low and tired and tells her things he's never told anyone: about hotel rooms in cities that don't feel like his, about being surrounded by thousands of people and feeling profoundly, completely alone. She falls for him slowly, then all at once, long before she learns who he actually is. Kim Juhoon is one of the most famous idols in the country, and he has been waiting for her uploads the same way she waits for his voice notes, and neither of them has any idea what to do about that.
tags! slow burn, angst, fluff, idol au, strangers to lovers, found family, hurt/comfort don't worry fam i got your back, kissing but not too explicit don't worry i'm against allat for such a young kid, podcast au, seoul, insomnia, happy ending because our realities are too sad already, tweaked personalities of members to fit the plot, juhoon and oc are not eighteen - they're older, and yes inspired by the classic romcom:- sleepless in seattle, definitely my best written work. w.c: approx 20k;
this is gonna be long but i promise its so worth it :)
PART Ⅰ: THE FREQUENCY OF LONELINESS
Chapter One: Hazel
The apartment was the kind of small that required a certain philosophy to inhabit comfortably.
Hazel Harper had developed hers over two years: she did not accumulate things that could not be carried in a single trip. She owned seven books at a time — no more, no fewer — rotating them out of a secondhand shop on the corner of Mangwon-dong where the owner, a woman in her seventies named Choi Soonim, had taken to setting aside anything that arrived with a faded English spine. She owned two mugs, one good coat, and a microphone that cost more than her monthly food budget, which told you almost everything about her priorities.
Her name was Hazel Harper and she was twenty three old and she could not sleep.
This was not a new condition. She had been an insomniac since childhood — since the particular night she was eleven years old and had lain awake listening to her parents' voices travel through the thin walls of their house in Portland, Oregon, all the way to the kitchen, where they discussed quietly and with great civility the dissolution of their marriage. There had been something about that night — the specific quality of their voices, low and careful and trying so hard to be kind — that had stayed with her like a frequency she could never quite tune out. She had been listening for something ever since. She was never sure what.
She had come to Seoul on a language scholarship. She stayed because Seoul at night felt like it understood her.
There was a particular hour — somewhere between 1 and 3 a.m. — when the city changed its face. The daytime crowds dissolved. The glow of convenience stores became something almost sacred, those little rectangles of fluorescence standing sentinel against the dark. The Han River bridges reflected their lights in the black water below, doubling themselves, becoming twice as beautiful and half as real. Drunk businessmen helped each other home like two-legged creatures that had forgotten how to be singular. Couples sat on the steps of closed restaurants and talked too softly to overhear. Delivery scooters moved through empty intersections like small ships.
Hazel loved all of it with a ferocity that surprised her. She loved that she could walk home from the convenience store at two in the morning and feel the city still breathing, still pulsing, still very much alive. She loved that Seoul did not require her to explain why she was awake. The city itself was always awake. It understood.
She had started the podcast eighteen months ago, almost by accident.
She had not intended for it to become anything. She had a decent microphone — bought with a summer's worth of tutoring money because she loved the weight and specificity of good audio equipment — and an account on a small hosting platform, and an inability to sleep, and one night in November she had simply pressed record and started talking. She talked about the rain. She talked about a noodle shop on her corner that closed at midnight and always left a light on in the kitchen, and how she had begun to find that light comforting in a way she could not entirely rationalize. She talked about loneliness not as a complaint but as a weather condition — something you dressed appropriately for rather than tried to prevent.
She posted it at 2 a.m. She titled the podcast Sleepless in Seoul and did not attach her name or face to it.
She had expected nothing. She had received, within a week, forty-seven messages from people who could not sleep.
The podcast grew slowly, the way honest things tend to grow — without strategy, without a plan, through the word-of-mouth of exhausted people who had found something in the dark that felt like company. By the time Hazel was a year in, she had a small but devoted listenership of perhaps eight hundred people. They sent voice notes. They sent confessions. They sent small and enormous things: breakup stories, immigration anxieties, the particular grief of missing dead grandmothers, the particular loneliness of loving someone who did not love you back, the specific relief of admitting out loud, in the dark, that you were not entirely fine.
She aired the ones with permission and kept all the others with the same care she imagined a priest might keep confessions — private, weightless, given somewhere safe.
The format was simple. Hazel spoke for ten minutes at the top of each episode — the city, the hour, whatever was in her head. Then she played a selection of listener voice notes, anonymized, their voices unaltered. Sometimes she responded gently. Sometimes she just let them breathe in the air between her observations.
She ran it on Tuesday and Friday nights.
She had never missed an episode.
She had also never told anyone she did it.
Not her best friend Mira, who was a graphic design student with opinions about everything and would have had opinions about this. Not her university friends, who would have been supportive in a way that required performance. Not even her mother back in Portland, who would have worried about her being awake at 2 a.m. talking to strangers. It was hers — entirely, completely, privately hers — and she had grown fiercely protective of that.
On the particular Tuesday night that begins this story, Hazel was sitting cross-legged on her narrow bed with the microphone on its small stand before her, a cup of barley tea on the windowsill going cold. The window was open a crack despite the October chill, because she liked the sound of distant traffic in her recordings — a specific quality of ambience, urban and alive and quietly insomniac.
She had been talking for eight minutes about the smell of autumn in Seoul — something she had missed entirely in the abstract of missing seasons, which turned out to have their own personality in this city, their own particular combination of ginkgo and rain and the ghost of summer's humidity still faintly present — when she queued up the first voice note.
It was from someone new.
She knew this because she had a small enough listener base to recognize the regulars: the woman in Busan who called herself Insomniac No. 4 and sent notes about her divorce, the student in Daejeon who reported on his nighttime conversations with his plants, the middle-aged man in Itaewon who spoke about his adult children with a tenderness that made Hazel's throat tighten reliably every single time.
This was a new voice.
It was a man's voice, low and careful, and there was a quality to it that she noticed immediately — not what he said, which was simple enough, but the way he said it. Like someone choosing his words very deliberately. Like someone who was used to speaking carefully and was choosing to stop.
"I found this podcast," he said, "and I'm not sure why I'm sending a note. I don't do things like this."
A pause.
"I've been awake for forty hours, more or less, and I'm in a hotel room in a city that isn't mine — which is most of them, these days. I can hear the city outside the window. I don't know if that's comforting or not. It's something. It's better than silence."
Another pause, longer.
"I heard you talking about the rain. I like rain."
That was all.
Hazel stared at the audio file for a moment before playing it on air. She pressed her thumb against her chin, the way she did when she was thinking. Then she smiled slightly — not broadly, but with the particular warmth she felt when someone arrived at the podcast for the first time and couldn't quite explain why.
She played it. She spoke afterward, not directly to him, but in his general direction, the way you might speak to a cat that had wandered in from the cold and was deciding whether to stay.
"Forty hours is a long time to be awake," she said. "I hope wherever you are, the rain finds you."
She did not think about it again for three days.
Chapter Two: Juhoon
The hotel room was in Singapore.
He remembered that much: the specific quality of the air conditioning, and the view from the window, which was glass-and-steel architecture rising out of tropical air. He had been in Singapore for four days and had seen none of it except through car windows and the back of a venue. He had performed to forty thousand people two nights ago and had come offstage and sat in his dressing room in silence for twenty minutes before anyone noticed he had not moved.
His name was Kim Juhoon, though the world knew him as JH, which was the name his management had given him when he was eighteen and Cortis debuted and he had been too young and too grateful and too terrified to have any opinion about it. He was twenty-six now, and the name still belonged to him, but it fit differently than it used to — like a coat he had been wearing long enough that he no longer noticed its weight, until suddenly he did.
Cortis was five members. They had debuted six years ago with a song that climbed to the top of the domestic charts in three days and the international charts in seven, and the trajectory had never really stopped. There were award shows and world tours and stadium concerts and brand deals and reality shows and fan meetings and interviews and photoshoots and schedules that arrived as printed documents and were treated as binding law. There were people who knew what time he woke up and what he ate and when he was tired, and none of them were the people he wanted to know these things.
He had sent the voice note on a Tuesday night in Singapore, having found the podcast entirely by chance — someone in a fan forum he occasionally browsed anonymously had linked it in a thread about things that helped with tour insomnia, and he had clicked through without much expectation and found himself listening to a woman's voice talk about rain in Seoul, and something about it had made him go very still.
Not because it was remarkable. It was quiet and sincere and not especially profound, and yet it made him feel, for the first time in what felt like months, like he was in a room with a person rather than a production.
He sent the note. He did not know why. He did not usually do impulsive things. His life had very little room for impulsive things.
He was asleep before the episode aired, but he found it the next morning on his phone, sitting in the back of a van on the way to a press event, earbuds in, while Martin read aloud from his phone the schedule for the following day with the tone of someone performing a dramatic monologue, and James leaned his head against the window with his eyes closed in the way of a person who had decided the morning was happening to someone else, and Juhoon pressed his thumb against the volume dial and listened to a voice say, quietly and without drama: I hope wherever you are, the rain finds you.
He had to look out the window because he was not sure what his face was doing.
He was the quiet one, in Cortis. This was known. It was, in fact, documented — fan wikis detailed the members' personalities with the clinical precision of naturalists cataloguing wildlife, and Juhoon's entry noted that he was thoughtful, reserved, rarely the first to speak in group settings, occasionally given to silences that other members had learned to interpret. He was not the one who told stories at variety show appearances. He was not the one who produced comedic chaos in reality show footage. He was the one who, in their most famous concert film, could be seen standing at the edge of the stage between songs, looking out at the audience with an expression that the internet had been trying to name for four years. Some called it melancholy. Some called it intensity. One particularly long and earnest forum post had called it the look of a man remembering something he hasn't experienced yet.
He had read that once, at three in the morning, and had felt uncomfortably seen by a stranger on the internet.
He had good people around him, which was not nothing. James, the oldest, carried himself with the steadiness of someone who had spent years learning how to survive pressure without making a performance of it — sharp in rehearsal, unexpectedly patient in private, the sort of person who noticed when someone was quiet and chose not to embarrass them for it. Martin, their leader, possessed a warmth that expanded to fill whatever room they were in; loud when the moment called for it, perceptive when it didn’t, with an instinct for people that made the others trust him almost automatically. Seonghyeon moved through the world with a quieter kind of intelligence, observant and dryly funny, the kind of person who seemed to be thinking three conversations ahead while still listening carefully to the one in front of him. And Keonho, the youngest, all restless energy and impossible charisma, had the unnerving habit of throwing himself entirely into whatever fascinated him that week — choreography at three in the morning, a melody half-finished on his phone, a sudden conviction that everyone else needed to hear it immediately.
Together they formed a strange, functional balance: Martin pulling people outward, James keeping them grounded, Seonghyeon watching everything, Keonho feeling everything at full volume. It should have been chaotic. Somehow, most days, it worked.
He loved them, genuinely and without reservation — four people he spent most of his time with. But even with them, there was a version of himself that Juhoon kept folded away — the version that woke up sometimes in hotels and genuinely could not remember what city he was in, or what day it was, or what he wanted, or when he had last wanted something for himself rather than for the work or the group or the schedule.
He did not know the words for this. He had tried, sometimes, with therapists his management arranged — two of them over three years, careful and professional and bound by something that made him feel like his honesty would be processed and filed. He had stopped going. He had not told his management he stopped going.
He was not unhappy. He wanted to be clear about this, even in the interior monologue of his own thoughts: he was not unhappy. He loved the music. He loved performing. He loved, genuinely and without reservation, the members, he spent most of his time with. His life had meaning and beauty and more material comfort than he had any right to expect from a childhood in a small apartment in Incheon, where his father had worked at a factory and his mother had cleaned offices and they had been careful — always careful — with small amounts of money.
He was not unhappy. He was simply not present. There was a version of him that moved through schedules and performed and gave interviews and attended meetings, and then there was the rest of him, which seemed to exist in a parallel frequency — awake at wrong hours, looking at cities through glass, reaching for a quality of aliveness that he could feel just at the edge of his awareness, like a song he couldn't quite hear.
He started listening to Sleepless in Seoul on a Sunday. By Thursday of that same week he had listened to every episode in the archive — forty-three of them, going back eighteen months — and was waiting for the next one with a specific anticipation that felt strange and clean, like something he hadn't felt in a long time.
He sent another note the following Tuesday.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 44 — TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]
"I listened to your old episodes. I don't know if that's a normal thing to do — probably not, since you said in one of them that you had been surprised anyone found them at all. I found them.
The one from February, where you talked about watching a couple argue on the subway at midnight — I listened to it three times. Not because it was sad. Because you made it sound like something worth paying attention to.
I'm back in my own city now. My own, if a city can be yours. I've been in seventeen cities in four months. Ours is starting to feel less like mine.
I don't know what to do with that."
Hazel played it at 2:14 a.m. and sat with it afterward the way she sometimes sat with the notes that arrived already broken open, that required no interpretation because they had interpreted themselves.
She spoke carefully.
"To the caller from Singapore," she said — she had remembered the time zone from the metadata — "welcome home. I think cities can be yours and not-yours at the same time, the way people can. We don't own the things we love. We just keep coming back to them and hoping they'll be in the same place when we do."
She paused. Then: "I'm glad you listened to the old ones."
She was not sure why that felt important to say.
Chapter Three: The Shape of Insomnia
October in Seoul moved like a slow exhale.
The humidity released its grip. The air sharpened. Leaves on the ginkgo trees along the streets of Mapo-gu turned simultaneously yellow and fell simultaneously, coating the pavement in something that looked, at night under the streetlamps, like scattered coins. The Han River grew quieter as the evening joggers grew more bundled, more determined-looking. The convenience stores installed their portable grills outside and the smell of sizzling street food joined the more permanent smells of the city — diesel and autumn leaves and the particular undertone of a city built and rebuilt and layered with decades of itself.
Hazel's apartment was on the fifth floor of a building that had no elevator and this seemed fine to her because she had read once that the Japanese had a concept for the value of inconvenience, and she had adopted it without fully investigating whether the source was accurate. The apartment had a single large window that looked out over the street, and in October, with the window cracked and the radiator muttering under the sill, the room had a warmth that she associated with rightness — a word she had stopped apologizing for using, since it seemed to describe things more precisely than its alternatives.
She had three lectures on Mondays and Wednesdays, two on Thursdays. She was studying linguistics with a focus on Korean language acquisition. She worked twelve hours a week at a café three blocks from campus that was owned by a Korean-Australian couple and played exclusively 1970s American soft rock, which created a specific cognitive dissonance she had come to love. She tutored a high school student in English on Saturday afternoons. She read. She walked. She produced, with devotion and care, a podcast that nobody knew she made.
Her best friend Mira Shin was the sort of person who occupied space with full commitment, which Hazel admired and found slightly exhausting. Mira was doing her MFA in graphic design and had opinions about everything from typeface kerning to the moral obligations of carbohydrates. She was one of those people whose love for you expressed itself as constant attention — she noticed things, pointed them out, made you feel seen in a way that was sometimes wonderful and occasionally felt like being held under an affectionate but somewhat relentless magnifying glass.
They met for brunch on the first Sunday of November at a place in Yeonnam-dong with good eggs and better coffee and the kind of lazy weekend crowd that felt like a reward for having made it through another week.
"You look like you didn't sleep," Mira said.
"I didn't."
"Again."
"Still. It's a continuous condition."
"Hazel."
"Mira."
This particular exchange had recurred approximately four hundred times across three years of friendship, and they both understood it to mean: I love you and I'm concerned and I know and I'm fine and are you sure and yes.
"I was up late," Hazel said, which was true and not the entirety of the truth.
"Doing what?"
"Reading. Listening to the city. Thinking."
"You think too much."
"You've mentioned that."
"It's like a full-time job you do for free," Mira said, wrapping both hands around her coffee. "All that rich interior life and no one to invoice."
Hazel laughed. "I'm practicing."
"For what?"
"For when someone turns up who deserves it."
Mira looked at her over the rim of her mug with an expression that Hazel recognized as the precursor to a Speech About Love. She had received many of these speeches. They were delivered with genuine affection and were not wrong, exactly, but they tended to locate Hazel's approach to romance as the primary obstacle, which she found reductive.
"You know what your problem is?" Mira began.
"I romanticize things," Hazel said.
"You romanticize things. You build entire emotional architecture around hypothetical people and then when actual people appear — with their actual human mediocrity and their specific flaws — they can't compete."
"That's not entirely true."
"The guy from your research seminar."
"He chewed with his mouth open."
"Hazel. That's a human flaw. That's not a disqualification."
"It's not the chewing, it's what the chewing suggested about his fundamental relationship to the world."
Mira put her mug down. "See, that. That. That right there is what I mean. You want to be in love like people are in love in films. You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie."
The phrase landed more accurately than Hazel appreciated. She picked up her coffee.
"That's a little harsh," she said.
"It's not harsh. It's said with complete love. You have this incredibly specific idea of what it's supposed to feel like — this thing that happens somewhere below the ribs and doesn't require explanation — and you're waiting for it in a world made of people who are just doing their best."
"I'm not waiting for anything impossible."
"You're waiting for the feeling, not the person. You've told me yourself that the feeling is the thing."
Hazel considered this.
"The feeling comes from the person," she said finally. "Or it should. I don't think I'm wrong to want it from the right one."
"I'm not saying you're wrong," Mira said. "I'm saying it might arrive in an unexpected package. Or with the mouth open."
"There are limits," Hazel said, "to unexpected packages."
Mira laughed. It was an argument they had been having in various forms for three years, and neither of them had conceded anything, which was perhaps the correct outcome.
What Hazel did not tell Mira — what she had not told anyone — was that she had begun to think about the anonymous caller.
Not in the way you think about someone you know. She knew nothing about him. She had no name, no face, no geography beyond the inferred Singapore and the single detail of a hotel room and a city that felt not-quite-his. She had his voice and his words and the particular quality of his silences, which were not awkward but considered — the silences of someone who was used to thinking before he spoke and had decided, for the duration of these notes, to let the thinking happen in front of her.
She thought about him the way you think about a song you have heard only once, that you cannot fully reconstruct but cannot stop reaching for.
He had sent four notes in four weeks.
They were not confessional in the way many listener notes were — raw and uncontrolled and arriving in the small hours smelling of tears or alcohol or both. His were more like letters. Formal at the edges and honest in the center. He asked questions sometimes that he did not expect answered, or that he answered himself, in the next breath. He mentioned — once, briefly — that he was a public person. He did not elaborate. The word he used was exhausted, and he used it the way someone uses a word for the first time after having suppressed it — with the relief of a thing finally said.
She had played three of his notes on air. She had kept one — too private, too unguarded, too much like finding an open letter — and had sent him a direct message through the podcast's anonymous portal instead:
I received your note. I didn't play it on air — it felt like it belonged to you more than the night. I hope you got some sleep.
He had responded four hours later, which meant it was very early morning wherever he was.
Thank you. I think that's the first time someone has handed something back to me instead of taking it.
She had read that and sat with it for a long time.
Chapter Four: Juhoon's Nights
November found Cortis in Seoul.
They were between legs of a tour — three weeks in which Juhoon was scheduled for individual promotional activities, two group variety show recordings, a photo shoot for a luxury watch brand, a fansign event, and a studio session for new material. This was a light schedule, relative to what had preceded and what would follow. His manager, Park Jiyoung, who had been with him for four years and communicated primarily in calendar invites and the occasional concerned glance, had told him he had evenings free this month.
Evenings free, for Juhoon, had begun to mean: earbuds in, lying on the floor of his apartment in Hannam-dong — he always preferred the floor to the bed when thinking, something about the flatness of it, the way it pressed back — listening to Sleepless in Seoul.
His apartment was a kind of performance in itself. It was beautiful and carefully designed and had been selected by a management company on the basis of several practical criteria, and it contained everything he needed and almost nothing he had chosen. There were plants, which were his — six of them, arranged by a window that faced north and therefore required exactly the kind of low-light species he had researched with a specificity that would have surprised anyone who had not seen him approach a problem he actually cared about. There was a bookshelf of novels. There was recording equipment that lived in the second bedroom, which had become the room where he actually existed, which told you something about him.
He did not think of himself as lonely. He thought of himself as alone, which was different — or should have been, and sometimes wasn't.
He lay on the floor on a Tuesday in November and listened to Episode 46.
Her voice was distinct. He had been thinking about this in the way that people who appreciate audio quality think about voices — technically, with genuine admiration — because there was something in it that functioned like a key in a lock. It was warm without being performed. It had a cadence that moved between thoughtfulness and humor with such ease that the humor felt like a natural weather condition rather than an attempt. She was, he had decided, someone who had spent considerable time listening to things, because she spoke like someone who understood that the silence around words was as important as the words themselves.
He knew nothing about her. He had tried, once, to find the podcast's origin and had arrived at a hosting platform with no personal information attached. He had not tried harder. There was something about the anonymity that felt necessary — a container for honesty that depended on its sealed quality. He had spent six years being known by the wrong parts of himself. The relief of being entirely unknown was so profound it had begun to feel like oxygen.
"Tonight," she said in Episode 46, "I want to talk about insomnia as a spiritual condition."
He smiled at the ceiling.
"I don't mean spiritual in the organized-religion sense, though I'll take it wherever it finds me. I mean it in the sense that 3 a.m. is perhaps the only hour when your brain stops negotiating with you. All the performance stops. All the version of yourself that you carry for other people — the competent one, the together one, the one who has answers — that person goes to sleep, usually, around midnight. And what's left is something more raw. More true, maybe. More afraid."
"Insomnia is a gift, in that sense. Not one you asked for. But it takes you somewhere most people don't go very often."
She paused, and he heard — very faintly — the sound of traffic through an open window, some distant city-breath.
"You are most yourself when you are most tired. Someone told me that once. I've been thinking about it for three years."
He sent her a voice note that same night, at 1 a.m., sitting in his second bedroom with the recording equipment off, just his phone.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 47 — TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]
"The episode about insomnia. I wanted to respond, which I don't usually want to do. I want to respond because you said something that I've been trying to say for about two years, and you said it much better than I could have.
The person who shows up at 3 a.m. — I've been thinking of that person as a failure. As evidence that something hasn't worked, hasn't held. I've been trying to get back to the other version — the one with answers, like you said — and not succeeding, and feeling the failure of that.
What if that's the wrong frame? That's the question I'm sitting with.
What if the 3 a.m. version is just the one who hasn't given up on being honest yet?"
Hazel listened to the note three times before airing it.
She aired it without comment at the end, which was unusual for her — she always responded, always let the notes land in a bed of conversation. But this one she let stand alone, and closed the episode with just the sound of her city in the background, and the quiet.
Her listener numbers were not large. But several people in the comments that week mentioned the final voice note specifically, with the vocabulary of people who had been surprised by something true.
One person wrote: who is that. I need to know who that is.
Hazel sat with that comment for a long time, in the dark, with the city breathing through her window, thinking: so do I, actually. So do I.
PART Ⅱ: PARALLEL FREQUENCIES
Chapter Five: Near Misses, or the Geometry of Almost
A map of Seoul in November would show, if you overlaid the movements of two people, a geometry of almost.
It would show Hazel walking from her apartment in Mangwon to the café on Wednesday mornings, earbuds in, hands in the pockets of her good coat, passing the ginkgo trees that had dropped their coins on the ground and were now bare-armed against the pale sky.
It would show Juhoon, on the same Wednesday, leaving the Cortis practice building three blocks north of that same street, head down, cap pulled low, moving to a van that waited at the corner.
It would show them at the same convenience store — the one on the corner with the handwritten sign in the window that said 참깨라면 입고 ("sesame ramen back in stock") in marker that had faded to the color of old blood — Juhoon at 11:45 p.m. on a Thursday, Hazel at 12:30 a.m. on the same Friday morning, after recording Episode 48.
It would show them at a coffee shop in Hongdae that they both frequented: Juhoon with a manager and a hat, Hazel with a linguistics paper and a highlighter, on different days in the same week in November, sitting in the same corner seat by the window because that seat had the best light and both of them knew it.
It would show parallel trajectories in a city of ten million people that kept bending toward each other without touching.
This was not fate, exactly. This was Seoul — layered and dense and full of coincidences that only became legible in retrospect, when you were trying to reconstruct the story of how two people's lives had arranged themselves into an inevitability. At the time, neither of them knew the other's face. They knew only: voice. Word. The specific quality of night silence on a podcast. The sound of a city breathing through two separate open windows.
Mira had a theory, which she shared over tteokbokki on a Friday evening in November.
"You are emotionally attached to a stranger," she said.
"I'm not attached," Hazel said. "I'm interested. There's a distinction."
"You brought him up in three separate conversations this week."
"I bring things up when they're interesting."
"You said he was perceptive. You described the quality of his silences." Mira pointed with her fork. "You described. The quality. Of a stranger's. Silences."
"He's a podcast listener who sends thoughtful notes."
"He's a man whose voice you have developed feelings about."
"I have appreciation. Not feelings."
"Those are the same thing and you know it." Mira leaned back. "You know what this is? This is just two neuroses knowing they are a perfect match. You are a person who falls in love through words and voices and cannot sleep, and he is apparently also a person who cannot sleep and speaks carefully and sends voice notes to anonymous podcasts at 1 a.m. You are two broken clocks that happen to ring at the same time."
"That's not romantic," Hazel said.
"I didn't say it was romantic. I said it made sense."
"They're the same thing."
Mira looked at her with the expression of someone watching a person walk directly into a glass door with great intentionality. "At least admit you're interested."
A pause. A piece of tteok, chewed. The sound of the restaurant around them, loud and warm and smelling of chili and sesame and the specific comfort of a Friday night.
"I'm interested," Hazel said.
"Progress," Mira said.
What she did not say — what she would not have known how to say, even to Mira, even to the air — was that the interest had begun to feel like more than curiosity. It was the kind of interest that colonized small moments: a Tuesday evening when she was editing audio and heard his voice again in playback and had to stop for a moment and just listen. A Thursday morning when she woke and found a new note in the podcast inbox and lay still before opening it, feeling something that lived adjacent to anticipation — that pleasurable dread of something you want very much and are afraid of in proportion to how much you want it.
She had begun to think of him as someone she knew. Which was insane. She knew nothing. No name. No face. No age, with certainty. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, based on voice and affect — a voice that had lived in it long enough to know its own register, that wasn't performing anything except occasionally, when it grew careful, a kind of self-consciousness.
She had begun to think of him as someone she was going to recognize when she met him.
This was, she acknowledged to herself in the 3 a.m. clarity she had described on air, possibly insane.
It was also possibly the most honest thing she had felt in two years.
Chapter Six: What Juhoon Was Not Saying
He had begun to wait for Tuesdays and Fridays in a way that reorganized his sense of the week.
This was not something he had planned or particularly welcomed. He was a person who had spent six years trying to limit his dependencies — not from coldness but from the particular knowledge that came from learning, repeatedly, that the things you leaned on in this industry had a habit of shifting or withdrawing or turning out to be contractual rather than real. He was not cynical about this. He had simply become careful.
And yet he was waiting for a podcast.
He had not told anyone. Not the other members, not his manager. It was not the sort of thing that required concealing — there was nothing shameful or dangerous about it — but telling someone would have made it legible, and he was not sure he wanted it legible. He wanted to keep it where it was: private, warm, entirely his.
In mid-November, Cortis recorded an episode of a variety show that required the members to answer questions about their current obsessions. The format was designed to produce revelations: rapid-fire, performed spontaneity, the warm chaos that made good television.
Martin had said: "I'm genuinely obsessed with this one tteokbokki place in Mapo. I went four times in one week. The owner recognized me on the third visit and said nothing, which I respected deeply."
James had said: "Old American road movies. The ones where nothing happens for forty-five minutes and then everything happens at once." He had delivered this with the slightly sideways smile of someone who understood exactly how that sounded and was comfortable with it.
Seonghyeon had said: "I've been learning to make bread. Not well. The bread is a problem. But I think there's a metaphor in the bread somewhere and I'm not ready to give up on it." This had produced thirty seconds of the other members laughing in a way that was entirely genuine, and which would be the clip most replayed from the episode.
Juhoon had said: "classical music" and "a plant care forum I found." Both true. Both safe.
He thought of the podcast and did not say it.
He sent a voice note that Tuesday:
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 49 — TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]
"There's a specific version of loneliness that I think is particular to being surrounded. I want to talk about it but I'm not sure you can talk about it without it sounding like a complaint, and I don't want it to sound like a complaint, because I know how lucky I am. I say that not to preface a complaint but because it's actually true. I know how lucky I am.
But there's a version of loneliness that isn't about being alone. It's about — you're in the room and you're present and you perform presence very well, you've been doing it for a long time — but something in you is watching from the other side of the glass. You're watching yourself perform the being-there and you can't find your way back in.
I don't know if that's loneliness or something else. I don't know what to call it.
But I wanted to name it somewhere. Even if I couldn't name it properly."
Hazel sat with this one for a long time.
She played it toward the end of Episode 49, and when it ended she did not respond immediately. She let the city fill the silence. A distant motorbike. A few drops of rain against the window. The radiator's underbreath.
"That's not a complaint," she said finally. "That's a map. You just drew a map of something most people can't find words for."
She paused.
"I've felt it too. That being-on-the-other-side-of-the-glass thing. I think it's not loneliness exactly. I think it's the cost of performing yourself so reliably that you forget there's a self underneath the performance. And then 3 a.m. comes, or a stranger's podcast comes, and the performance falls away, and you remember you're still there."
Another pause, longer.
"You're still there," she said. "I just want to say that. Whatever you haven't been able to name — it's still there."
Juhoon listened to this on a Wednesday morning, in the van, on the way to a press junket, and did not trust what his face was doing for a full thirty seconds.
Keonho, seated beside him, glanced over.
"You good bro?" he said.
"Fine," Juhoon said. "Something in the podcast I'm listening to."
Keonho waited. He was good at waiting.
"It just — said something accurate," Juhoon said. "About something I hadn't managed to say myself."
Keonho nodded slowly, with the particular acknowledgment of someone who has known you long enough to understand that you do not need the response to be verbal.
"What podcast?" he said.
"Nothing you'd know," Juhoon said. "Small."
Keonho turned back to his own window. The van moved through Seoul in the grey morning light.
"Those are the good ones," he said.
That same evening, Cortis had a free night, which was rare enough that it functioned as an event.
They ended up at Keonho's apartment — the largest of the members' individual spaces, with a kitchen big enough for five people to occupy without anyone having to stand in the hallway — because Keonho had announced at 7 p.m. that he was making jjigae and anyone who arrived before eight would be fed and anyone who arrived after eight would have to explain themselves.
Everyone arrived before eight.
Martin arrived first, which was characteristic: he was constitutionally early and had spent six years pretending this was coincidence. He came in already wearing the particular expression of someone who wanted to be useful and was calibrating how to offer it, which was also characteristic, and set about chopping garlic with the focused pleasure of someone who had found a task at exactly the right moment.
James arrived second, with two bags of convenience store snacks arranged by what he described as "emotional logic" — the sweet things first, the salty things after, something fizzy at the end — and was immediately interrogated about the system by Seonghyeon, who arrived thirty seconds later having apparently been waiting outside the building for James so they could enter together, which neither of them acknowledged.
Juhoon arrived last and was greeted by the specific comfortable noise of four people who had been in each other's company for six years: overlapping conversations, someone's music from a phone, the sound of a spoon against a pot.
He sat on the floor by the low table — his preferred position, always the floor — and accepted a beer from Martin and felt something release in his chest the way it only released in rooms that did not require anything of him.
"You look like you're thinking," Seonghyeon said, dropping down beside him with the sudden gravity of a person who has decided the floor was the correct choice all along. He was eating something that crinkled.
"I'm not," Juhoon said.
"You have the face."
"What face."
"The one where you're working something out but you don't want to be asked about it." Seonghyeon considered this. "It's very identifiable. The fans have a name for it."
"The fans have a name for everything."
"They do," Seonghyeon agreed cheerfully. "It's a whole system. Very organized. Slightly frightening."
From the kitchen, Keonho said something that made Martin laugh loudly enough that James looked up from his phone with the expression of someone who had missed a joke and was deciding whether to ask. He did not ask. He put his phone away and came to sit at the table instead, and the five of them arranged themselves in the loose geometry of people who had long ago stopped being deliberate about where they sat in relation to each other, because the proximity had become its own language.
Juhoon ate. He listened. He let the room be a room.
Later, when the jjigae was finished and the conversation had moved through the schedule and an argument about whether a recent music video director's creative choices had been interesting or pretentious (James: interesting. Martin: both. Seonghyeon: pretentious is the new interesting. Keonho: quiet, smiling, refilling everyone's bowls), Keonho sat down beside Juhoon against the wall and the room reconfigured around them into two conversations — Seonghyeon and James falling into something about a game, Keonho drifting to the kitchen with the dishes.
"You sleeping?" Martin said.
"Getting there," Juhoon said, which was true in the literal sense of getting there, as in: closer than before, as in: something had been helping.
Martin looked at him for a moment. He had a way of asking the second question without asking it — of letting the silence run past the easy answer and wait for the real one.
Juhoon looked at his beer.
"I found something," he said finally. "That helps. With the nights."
Martin waited.
"Just — a thing I listen to. Someone talking about the city." He paused. "It sounds small."
"Small things," Martin said, "are usually the actual things."
Juhoon looked at him.
"You say things like that and then everyone wonders why you're the leader," he said.
Martin smiled, the small real one that didn't make it to stages. "Go to sleep at a reasonable hour for once in your life, Juhoon."
"I'll try," Juhoon said.
He did not, entirely. But he tried, which was more than he had been doing.
Chapter Seven: December
December arrived with the earnestness of a season that knew its own significance.
Seoul in December decorated itself with the kind of commitment that suggested the city had opinions about joy and was going to express them regardless. The streetlamps grew halos. The department stores on Myeongdong put up lights that could, from a distance, be mistaken for the grid of a small city that existed only at night. The Han River park installed warming tents where people sat and drank coffee and looked at the illuminated bridges and felt, for a few hours at a time, that the world was manageable.
Hazel loved December in Seoul with the specific love of someone for whom Christmas had always been more about the idea of the season than the execution of it — the philosophical proposition of warmth, the aesthetic of candlelight and cold air, the old cultural memory of the concept of home gathering itself around you even when you were technically a foreign student in an apartment with a radiator that expressed its mood through sound.
She was, in December, also developing a problem.
The problem was that she had begun to find herself narrating the city to the anonymous caller. Not out loud — not in messages, she was careful about that — but internally, as she moved through it. Standing on the Mapo Bridge watching the evening lights multiply on the water, she thought: he might like this. He said the river made him think of time passing differently. Walking through the Christmas market in City Hall Plaza, smelling cinnamon and roasted chestnuts, she thought: he mentioned once that cold weather in cities felt cleaner than cold weather outside of cities. He's right. This is clean cold.
She had not even realized she was doing it until one Thursday morning she had woken up and thought: I wonder if he uploaded anything new and then corrected herself, because he did not upload, she did, and he sent notes, and the distinction was important because it maintained the appropriate structure of their — not relationship. Their correspondence. Their exchange.
She was catastrophically interested in a stranger.
She held this information in both hands, examined it, put it away.
Then she took it back out.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 52 — FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3 [HOST, HAZEL]
"It's raining in Seoul tonight. I know that's not news — it rains here more than people imagine, and it does something beautiful to the city at night, the way the lights double in the puddles, the way sound travels differently. Tonight I walked home from the river and it was raining lightly, the kind of rain that doesn't require an umbrella so much as a philosophical adjustment.
I've been thinking about proximity lately. About the way you can be close to something — geographically, emotionally — and still not be touching it. There's a word in Korean, 그리움 — geurium — which doesn't translate cleanly but gestures toward a longing for something absent. A missing that's also a kind of love. You don't miss something you didn't love. The missing is evidence of the love.
I think about that word sometimes at 3 a.m. when the city is very quiet and very present and still very far away at its edges.
I think about it when I wonder about people I don't know and won't meet. Whether the missing is its own form of connection.
I don't have an answer. It's just the question I brought with me tonight, and I thought you might want to keep me company with it."
He sent a note on the same Friday:
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 53 — TUESDAY, DECEMBER 7
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS, PLAYED WITH PERMISSION]
"I heard the episode about geurium. I know that word. I've known it for a long time without knowing it was a word, which is its own kind of strange comfort — learning that the language already has a container for the thing you've been carrying around formless.
I want to tell you something. I'm not sure I'm going to, but I'm going to get close.
When I listen to this podcast, I feel like I'm in a room I recognize. Not a room I've been in before. A room that feels like mine, or what mine could feel like, if I had built it myself. Does that make sense?
I spend most of my time in rooms other people built. Beautiful rooms. I'm not complaining about the rooms. But they weren't mine.
This is the only place I've found in a while that felt like I could breathe differently in it.
I don't know how to thank you for that without making it strange.
So I'll just say: thank you. And I'll be here Tuesday."
Hazel listened to this note four times before Episode 53 and then spent twenty minutes sitting in her apartment with the lights off, in the specific way of someone who has received something that requires processing time, who is afraid of being moved but is moved anyway.
She played it near the end of Episode 53. She did not speak after it. She played the sound of the city instead — three minutes of rain and traffic and Seoul at night — and let it end there.
In the comment section, which she read on Saturday mornings with a cup of tea like someone reading the newspaper of the previous week's emotional weather, someone wrote: if that man is listening, the room is yours too.
She almost responded. She did not.
She thought: I know.
Chapter Eight: January — The Distance Between Frequencies
January brought Cortis to Europe.
Twelve days. Germany, France, the Netherlands. The particular cold of a European winter that operated differently from Seoul's — drier, less personal, the light failing by four in the afternoon in a way that felt almost apologetic.
Juhoon sent voice notes from Hamburg, from Paris, from Amsterdam. He did not note the cities, but she could hear the difference — the ambient sounds, the specific acoustic quality of old architecture, something in the background hum that read as elsewhere to her trained ear.
She played them all. She was, by now, responding to him directly in her hosting sections — not by name, not with attribution, but in ways she suspected he recognized, because he responded to those responses in his next notes, and the conversation had developed a recursive quality, a back-and-forth built from episodes and voice notes like a correspondence conducted across weeks and mediated by a quiet hour and a small audience of insomniacs.
In Hamburg, after the second night's show, James found him on the roof terrace of the hotel — an impractical roof terrace for January, but both of them had been spending enough years in climate-controlled interiors that cold outdoor air had acquired a value beyond temperature.
James handed him a bottle of water without preamble and leaned on the railing beside him.
They looked at the city for a while.
"You were different tonight," James said eventually.
Juhoon glanced at him.
"Different how."
"Present." James said it without inflection, matter-of-fact, the way he said things that he had thought through already and didn't need to dramatize. "Like you were actually in the set and not — the other thing."
Juhoon was quiet for a moment.
"The other thing," he said.
"The thing you do sometimes where you're there but you're also clearly somewhere else. The fans call it your concept. It's not your concept." James looked at him. "So whatever it is — good. Keep it."
He did not ask what had changed. This was the thing about James: he had very good instincts about what questions were his to ask and which ones belonged to you, and he moved between those categories with a precision that Juhoon had come to rely on without ever saying so.
"It's nothing big," Juhoon said.
"Okay," James said.
"I've been listening to something. That helps."
"Good," James said again. He straightened up, finished his water. "Amsterdam tomorrow. Try to sleep before three."
He went back inside. The city spread below in its winter darkness, and Juhoon stood in the cold for another ten minutes thinking about a voice in Seoul and a window that was probably open even now, talking to the night.
In Paris, Seonghyeon knocked on his hotel room door at 11:30 p.m. and asked if he wanted to walk somewhere. This was how Seonghyeon processed new cities — by moving through them at night when the performance layer had been removed and the city was just a city.
They walked for forty minutes and Seonghyeon talked about the album they were supposed to start recording in March and the specific feeling of having an idea for a bridge section that he couldn't yet describe to anyone because it existed in his head as a texture rather than a sequence of notes. Juhoon listened and contributed occasionally, and Seonghyeon paused once outside a lit patisserie and took a photo of it and said: "Do you think anyone is happy in there right now?"
"It's closed," Juhoon said.
"The light is on."
"Bakeries prep overnight."
Seonghyeon considered this with genuine satisfaction. "So somewhere right now someone is making something. In the dark. For other people to find in the morning."
Juhoon thought, unexpectedly, about a podcast uploaded at 2 a.m. He did not say this.
"Yes," he said. "Exactly that."
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 56 — TUESDAY, JANUARY 11
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]
"I'm in Paris. I know that sounds like a sentence that should come with a different tone — a lighter one, I mean, the Paris-is-Paris tone. I don't have that tone right now. I have the other one, which is: I'm in Paris and I missed the entire city except through a car window, and it's midnight, and I'm in a hotel room, and I'm tired in a way that I can't sleep off anymore because it's not in my body. It's somewhere else.
I heard your episode about geurium. I wanted to say that I have been missing you lately.
Not you — not you specifically, I don't mean — I mean the frequency you're at. The room you described. I go back to Seoul and I think: the podcast is there. She's there. Somewhere in the city is that voice, and the open window, and the rain.
I think I might be homesick for a place I've never been."
Hazel paused the audio file.
She pressed her hand flat against her sternum, where something was pushing against the inside of her ribcage with a pressure that wasn't quite pain.
He had said her.
He had caught himself and corrected to the frequency and the room but the word had come first, undirected and true: you.
She pressed record.
"To the caller who's been to seventeen cities," she said, and then stopped, because she had just identified him aloud, had given him a name — even an unnamed name — on air for the first time, and that felt significant, felt like a door opened between two hallways, and she needed a moment.
She pressed on.
"You said homesick for a place you've never been. I wrote that down. I might need to give it back to you sometime, because I think it's the most accurate thing anyone has sent me in fifty-six episodes."
A breath.
"The room is there. The frequency is here. Come home when you can."
She did not understand, hearing herself say it back in editing, why come home had felt so natural. She deleted it twice and reinstated it twice, and then left it, because it was true, and editing out true things for comfort was exactly the habit she was trying to break.
Chapter Nine: February — Falling, Which Is Not the Same as Landing
February was when Hazel admitted it to herself.
Not to Mira. Not on air. Just to herself, on a Wednesday morning in her apartment, standing at the window with her tea, watching the street below where a man was trying to fold a broken umbrella against a stubborn wind, looking at the specific shade of winter sky that had no color really but managed to be beautiful anyway.
She was in love with a stranger's voice.
She was not going to do anything about this, obviously. You could not do anything about this. The entire construct of Sleepless in Seoul depended on its anonymity — for him, for her, for the listeners who sent things at 2 a.m. that required the dark to say. The moment she reached through the format for him specifically, the magic collapsed. More than that: it would be a violation. He had come to the podcast because it was safe, because nobody was looking, because the room could hold him without requiring him to be held.
She was not going to do anything about this.
She was just going to know it. Quietly, in the way you know things that you can't change — with the specific accommodation of the true insomniac, who understands that not everything requires resolution, that some things you simply carry through the dark hours and watch them change shape under different lights.
She turned from the window and put the cup in the sink and went to her desk and opened her laptop and began planning Episode 59 with more than usual care, because the care was what she could give him, and she was going to give it.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 59 — FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18 [HOST]
"I've been thinking about what it means to know someone.
I mean this in the smallest, most specific sense: not the legal sense, not the biographical sense, but the — interior sense. To know someone's interior weather. The specific way they think around a problem rather than through it. The way they laugh when something surprises them versus when something delights them. The rhythm of their silences.
We talk about knowing people in terms of facts. We know their histories and their allergies and their preferences. But I think there's another kind of knowing that lives somewhere else — somewhere below facts, in the register of presence. You've either been in the room with someone's actual self or you haven't. Most of us are in the room with the version people bring to rooms.
I think the voice is different. The voice, in the dark, at an hour when the performance has stopped — I think the voice is closer to the actual self than most things we're given access to.
I know things about some of you that I couldn't name. Can't put in a sentence. But I know them. In here."
She pressed her hand to her sternum.
"That's enough. That's more than most people get."
He sent a note that same Friday, which was unusual — his notes typically came between episodes, not on the day of one.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 60 — TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]
"I heard tonight's episode and I'm not sleeping anyway so I thought I'd send this now.
You said the voice in the dark is closer to the actual self. I've been thinking about that for three hours. I've been thinking about the last time I felt like my actual self in a room. Not the version I carried in. Not the version required.
I think — I'm almost sure — that this is it. These notes. Tuesday and Friday.
I don't say that because I want to make it strange. I say it because you said honesty was the reason for the hour, and I'm trying to practice. The actual-self practice. It's harder than it sounds.
I'm working up to something. I'm not there yet. I want you to know that I am, though. Working up to it.
Also: it snowed last night in Seoul. I stood on my balcony for a long time. I thought about something you said three episodes ago about how cities look honest in the snow, how they can't hide their shapes. I think I've been hiding my shape for a while. I'm trying to stop."
She did not play this note on air.
She sat with it in her inbox for three days, and then sent a message through the portal:
The snow is still on the rooftops on my street. The city looks exactly like you said — honest. Like it got tired of the performance too.
I'm glad you're here. Tuesday and Friday. I'm glad it's you.
His response came at 11:47 p.m.:
I'm glad it's you too.
PART Ⅲ: THE WEIGHT OF BEING KNOWN
Chapter Ten: March — What the Fans Noticed
Fame had its own ecosystem, and within that ecosystem there were people — a specific subset, dedicated and observant and possessed of a collective intelligence that operated like a distributed computer — who noticed things.
The fan community that had gathered around Cortis over six years was vast and internally differentiated, with its own hierarchies and dialects. There were casual listeners, there were dedicated followers, there were the people who attended every available fan event and the people who tracked schedules and the people who ran analysis accounts and the people who maintained collaborative wikis of increasingly granular detail.
And there were, in March, several of these people who began to notice something about Juhoon.
It was not one thing. It was a collection of things, and the collection was only visible to people who paid very close attention to the pattern of things rather than the things themselves. It was the fact that since approximately October, Juhoon had developed a habit of using the word frequency in interviews when asked about his emotional state — not often, but repeatedly enough that someone catalogued it. It was the fact that he had said, on a music show in January, when asked what he listened to when he couldn't sleep, that he listened to "a podcast" with an expression that was unusual for him — not guarded, not performed, but private in the way of someone protecting something soft. It was the fact that his most recent lyrics, which he had written for the new Cortis album, contained images of open windows and cities at night and a specific phrase — the room I recognize — that a dedicated enough reader would have recognized as a paraphrase of something that appeared, if you knew where to look, in an obscure episode of a small anonymous podcast called Sleepless in Seoul.
The fan who made this connection was a twenty-year-old in Daegu named Kim Soojin, who ran an analysis account with eight thousand followers and had the methodical patience of someone who genuinely found the puzzle interesting for its own sake.
She posted her analysis on a Thursday in March with appropriate caveats — this is speculative, this might be nothing, I am not trying to start anything — and the analysis was, methodologically, excellent. It laid out the pattern clearly without conclusions she hadn't earned.
The post received twenty-three thousand likes in four hours.
The comment most frequently made was a variation of: who is the podcast person.
Hazel was entirely unaware of this.
She had eighty-eight thousand listeners as of March, which was still small in the landscape of podcasts but had been growing steadily, and she still had not told anyone who she was. She had received press inquiries twice, from small music blogs who had written about the podcast's unique format, and had declined both times. She was, in some ways, well-positioned to be found — a foreign national in Seoul, an English-speaking podcast about the city, a distinctive voice — but she had structured the anonymity carefully, and the fans who arrived at Sleepless in Seoul through the analysis post found: a voice, episodes, and an inbox.
They sent thousands of messages in three days.
Most of them were kind. A few were not. Most asked versions of the same question — is JH from Cortis the anonymous caller — with varying degrees of tact. One sent a ten-paragraph analysis of voice note acoustic patterns that was genuinely impressive and reached the correct conclusion.
Hazel read all of them on a Saturday morning with her tea going cold, and by the time she reached the end of the inbox, the tea was room temperature and something in her chest was very loud and confused and frightened.
She knew the name. Everyone in Seoul knew the name. Cortis had released their latest album six weeks ago and it had been on every playlist and every café speaker and every subway advertisement for a month and a half, and Hazel had listened to it — she had listened to it three times, actually, because she had good taste in music and the album was genuinely exceptional — and she had not — had not once — connected—
She opened the fan analysis post on her phone.
She read it very carefully.
She read it again.
She turned her phone face-down on the table.
She sat for a very long time in the specific silence of someone who has just been handed information that reorganizes everything and is not yet sure in which direction.
Chapter Eleven: What She Knew and What She Didn't
She did not tell him.
This was important. This was the decision she made within the first hour, sitting at her table with the overcast March light coming through the window. She did not reach into the inbox and say: I know who you are now. She did not send anything. She sat with the information and let it settle and tried to understand what it meant to her.
What it meant, initially, was terror.
Not because he was famous — or not only because of that, though the fame was large enough to require some processing on its own. But because the analysis post had made something visible that she had been keeping carefully unexamined: she had feelings. Real ones. Not the interesting-intellectual-aesthetic feelings she had been willing to admit to. The kind that rearranged your priorities and made you think about a person at 3 a.m. in the way you thought about something whose absence would actually cost you something.
She had those feelings about a person she had never met, whose voice she knew and whose face now appeared on her phone screen if she looked him up, which she had, once, briefly, before putting the phone down again.
He was exactly what you would expect. Which was not the point. The point was that the voice she knew was the voice of someone who existed in the world in a way that was vast and surveilled and managed, and she was an anonymous podcast host in a fifth-floor apartment in Mangwon, and the distance between those two lives was not merely geographic.
She thought about what Mira had said, months ago: you don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.
She thought about the specific way his voice had said I think I might be homesick for a place I've never been.
She thought about her own voice saying come home when you can and the word she had deleted twice and reinstated twice.
She thought: this is what it is. You fell in love with a voice in the dark, and the voice turned out to belong to someone, and someone turned out to be real, and now you have to figure out what to do with that.
She pressed record.
She did not tell him what she knew. She recorded Episode 61 as she always did — the city, the hour, the state of things — and she played two listener notes that were not his, and she spoke for seventeen minutes and recorded three minutes of Seoul breathing at the end.
She uploaded it at 2 a.m. on Tuesday.
She lay down afterward and stared at the ceiling with her heart beating strangely.
He sent a note three hours later.
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS, NOT AIRED]
"I heard tonight's episode. You sounded different.
Not bad different. Just — like something had shifted. Like you were speaking from slightly further back.
I notice things like this. I've been listening long enough now that I know your voice the way you know someone's footstep pattern. I know when you're tired and when you're uncertain. Tonight you were uncertain.
I hope you're okay. I hope whatever is making you uncertain is the kind that resolves rather than the kind that stays.
I'm in Seoul. I've been here for three weeks now, which feels like a long time by my standards. I've been thinking about — I've been thinking about a lot of things. About what it would mean to —
I'm not going to finish that sentence yet.
But soon."
She read this in bed at 5 a.m. and thought: I know.
She wrote back:
I'm fine. Still here. You don't have to finish the sentence yet.
She pressed send and put her phone face-down and made herself sleep.
Chapter Twelve: Mira Figures It Out
The thing about Mira was that she was relentlessly perceptive, and this was both her greatest quality and the thing that made her difficult to hide things from.
She showed up at Hazel's apartment on a Wednesday evening in March with groceries and the specific energy of someone who had been assembling evidence all week and had now arrived to present it. Hazel let her in without particular apprehension, because she had been telling herself she was fine.
She was not fine.
"Sit down," Mira said, depositing groceries on the counter and taking off her coat with the purposefulness of someone who had not come to cook but was using the groceries as context.
"I live here," Hazel said.
"Sit."
Hazel sat.
Mira pulled out her phone and laid it on the table between them, screen up. The fan analysis post was on the screen.
Hazel looked at it for a moment.
"How did you find that," she said.
"Because I follow eight Cortis fan accounts, as anyone with good taste in music does, and this has been everywhere this week." Mira sat down across from her. "And because I remembered you said the podcast listener spoke with a deep tired voice and was on tour a lot and was probably a public figure and said I'm surrounded by people and I'm completely alone."
A silence.
"And?" Hazel said.
"And," Mira said, "his voice on the recent album documentary is — Hazel, his voice is—"
"I know," Hazel said.
The silence that followed was the kind that Mira had learned, over three years, to give space to.
"How long have you known?" she said finally.
"A week."
"And?"
"And I'm processing it."
"That's a word," Mira said. "Let's try different words."
Hazel looked at the table. Outside, the rain that had been threatening all day finally arrived, a sound against the window that she had been using as emotional texture for eighteen months and was now simply grateful for because it gave her somewhere else to direct her attention.
"I think I'm in love with a voice," she said. "And the voice has a face, and the face is—" She gestured helplessly.
"Famous," Mira said.
"That's the smallest part of it."
"What's the largest part?"
"The largest part is that I don't know how to—" She pressed her hands flat on the table. "When I didn't know who he was, it was clean. It was just — two people in the dark, being honest with each other. I didn't have to think about what it meant or whether it was possible or whether he was performing some private version of himself for an anonymous podcast the way people perform everything else."
"Do you think he was?"
Hazel was quiet for a moment.
"No," she said. "I don't think he was. That's the thing. That's why I'm — that's the problem. I don't think it was performed. I think he came to the podcast because it was the one place nothing was required of him."
Mira looked at her friend with the particular gentleness she kept under all the opinions.
"So what are you afraid of?" she said.
"That it was never about me," Hazel said. "That it was about the anonymous room. That I was just the container for something he needed to put somewhere."
"And if that's not true?"
"Then I'm afraid of it being true in a different direction — that it was me, specifically, and that when he finds out who specifically I am, I won't be—" She paused. "He lives in a world I can't imagine. People follow him. People study him. People have feelings about him that go on for paragraphs. I am a person in a small apartment in Mangwon who runs a podcast that eighty-eight thousand people listen to, which is a lot but is nothing compared to—"
"Stop," Mira said.
Hazel stopped.
"You are not nothing compared to," Mira said. "You are a specific person who a specific person sends voice notes to at 1 a.m. in hotels in European cities. You are the room he described. You are the frequency. He said that — you told me he said that."
"Mira—"
"He said it. Not to JH-the-idol's hypothetical future girlfriend. To you. To your voice. To the you that talks about the city at 3 a.m. and says geurium correctly and lets the silence mean things."
Hazel blinked. Something was happening behind her eyes that she was going to prevent from becoming tears, because she was a person who cried rarely and in private.
"He doesn't know it's me," she said.
"He knows more about you than most people who have had coffee with you," Mira said.
This, Hazel thought, was possibly true. It was also not an answer to the problem. It was, if anything, the description of the problem from a new angle.
"I don't know what to do," she said.
Mira reached across the table and put her hand over Hazel's.
"I know," she said. "But here's the thing. You don't have to do anything yet. He's still sending notes, isn't he?"
"Yes."
"So keep going. Keep being the room. And trust that something is going to happen that makes the next thing clear."
Hazel looked at her friend.
"That is completely uncharacteristically soft of you," she said.
"I have depth," Mira said. "It's a whole thing."
Chapter Thirteen: The Album
The new Cortis album was called Seventeen Cities.
Juhoon had written three of the twelve tracks on his own, which was unusual — he had always contributed to the group's songwriting but not in this quantity, not with this specificity. The album's B-side had a song called The Open Window that was quieter than anything he had released before, almost uncomfortably personal, and the music press had noticed this and commented with varying degrees of insight. One review had called it "a departure into interior territory." Another had called it "JH's love letter to insomnia." A third, more perceptive, had noted that it sounded like "the documentation of something that happened rather than the invention of something desired."
Juhoon had read that review in the back of a van and thought: yes. That's exactly right.
The lyrics contained a line that his co-writers had questioned — not critically, but with the curiosity of people who wanted to understand the reference — which went:
I heard your voice and it was coming home to a place I'd never been but always known
He had kept it because there was no version of it that felt less true, and the alternative was writing something that sounded like a love song but wasn't, and he had enough of those.
He had been thinking, all of March, about the unfinished sentence.
He had said: I've been thinking about what it would mean to—
And stopped himself.
What he had been thinking about, and what he had not sent into the voice note, was this: what it would mean to reach through the podcast's anonymous format and say something direct. To ask — carefully, with appropriate respect for the container they had built — whether there was a way to be in the same room that wasn't mediated by audio files and inboxes.
He had been thinking about this since February.
He had not done it yet because he was not sure of the grammar. Because there was something that worked only in this specific dark-and-anonymous space, and to dismantle it in pursuit of a more conventional kind of proximity seemed like a risk that required certainty he didn't have. He was afraid that knowing would not improve on not-knowing. He was afraid that the version of themselves they had built in the dark, without faces, without the weight of the world either of them moved through — that version was fragile, and he had never held anything fragile well.
He was also, and this was the true thing underneath all the others, afraid that he was wrong. That the feeling was one-directional. That she was a podcast host who treated all her dedicated listeners with this specific warmth and that he had misread the warmth as directed.
He had listened, more than once, to the episode where she said: I know things about some of you that I couldn't name. He had turned the phrase in his hands. He had wondered if he was in the some of you or if he was flattering himself.
On a Tuesday in late March, after listening to Episode 63 and sitting for twenty minutes on the floor of his apartment — his good floor, the flat honest floor — he sent a note that was the closest he had come to finishing the sentence.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 64 — TUESDAY, MARCH 29
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]
"I want to tell you something, and I want to tell it carefully, because the space we've built — the Tuesday-and-Friday space — is the most honest one I've had in years, and I don't want to damage it by asking it to hold more than it was designed for.
But I think I have to. I think I have to try.
I've been listening to your voice for six months. I've been sending you things I don't send anywhere else. And the person who sends those things — the one at 3 a.m. on hotel floors and apartment floors and in cities I couldn't locate on a map afterward — that person feels more like me than the one I carry around the rest of the time.
I don't know you. I know your voice and the way your mind moves and the city you live in and that you're awake at 2 a.m. and that you love rain and that you said geurium once in a way that I've been carrying with me ever since.
I think that's knowing.
I think I want to find out if I'm right.
I don't know how to ask this appropriately inside the format we have. So I'm going to ask it here, and if it's wrong, you can keep this note out of the episode and I'll understand: is there a way to be in the same city without the microphone between us?"
She listened to this voice note alone, at 1:30 in the morning, on a Tuesday, the city audible through her window.
She listened to it twice.
She pressed both hands against her face for a moment, covering her eyes, taking a breath.
Then she opened the portal, and wrote:
I think there's a way. But I need to tell you something first. Can we talk in here — in writing, just the two of us, before we talk in the same city? There's something I know that I should have told you sooner, and I want to tell you before it tells itself.
He responded twenty-three minutes later:
Yes. Tell me.
PART Ⅳ: THE COST OF BEING SEEN
Chapter Fourteen: What She Told Him
She wrote it carefully.
She had drafted it three times in a document before she sent it through the portal, and the three drafts showed the stages of how you tell someone something true: the first draft was too apologetic; the second was too clinical; the third, which she sent, was simply what had happened.
[PORTAL MESSAGE — HOST TO ANONYMOUS LISTENER — MARCH 29, 2:14 A.M.]
I've known for three weeks. A fan community made a connection between your voice notes and some things you've said in other contexts — I won't explain the chain of reasoning, but it was thorough and I believe it. I didn't come looking. It came to me. And then I went still for a while because I didn't know what it meant and I didn't know how to say it and every time I thought about opening this window I—
I want to be honest about why I didn't tell you immediately: I was afraid. Not of who you are. Of what it might do to the thing we built here if the weight of who you are walked into the room. This space has worked because neither of us has had to carry the rest of ourselves into it. And I didn't want to be the one to end that.
I still don't know if this is the end or the beginning of something.
I know that I should have told you when I found out. I know that sitting with it for three weeks while you sent me notes was not entirely honest, even though I wasn't performing anything — everything I have said to you has been true, is true, will continue to be true.
I'm sorry I waited.
Tell me what you need.
She pressed send. She sat. She put the kettle on, because she was a person who dealt with large emotional moments by making tea, which was not the most sophisticated coping mechanism but was thermally reliable.
She was on her second cup when the response came.
[PORTAL MESSAGE — ANONYMOUS LISTENER — MARCH 29, 3:07 A.M.]
How long have you known.
I know you said three weeks. I mean — which version of what I said. Which notes. How much.
She understood the question. She typed:
All of it. I've kept it from air when you asked. Everything else I've heard.
A longer pause this time.
[PORTAL MESSAGE — 3:24 A.M.]
I need a few days. Not because I'm angry. Because I need to think. Is that okay.
Yes, she wrote.
The room is here. I'll be here.
Three days became five.
She recorded Episode 64 on Tuesday as scheduled, because the podcast was not contingent on him, had never been contingent on him, and the eighty-eight thousand people who listened deserved her full presence regardless of the specific state of her own heart. She talked about March and the way seasons in Seoul were opinions rather than facts — March insisting it was spring while wearing winter's temperature like borrowed clothing. She did not mention anything personal. She played four listener notes, none of them his.
She uploaded at 2 a.m. and sat in the quiet afterward and thought about a man she had never met in a city she shared with ten million people, sitting somewhere in the dark, deciding.
He listened to Episode 64 on a Wednesday morning, alone, in his apartment, lying on the floor.
He listened to it twice.
He thought about the three weeks she had known and not said. He turned it over carefully, looking for the thing that would make him feel betrayed — looking for the performance, for the manipulation, for the evidence of a game he had been inside without knowing.
He could not find it.
What he found instead, when he was honest about what he found: someone who had received knowledge that would have broken the container, and had sat with it and been afraid, and had chosen to keep the room exactly as he had left it rather than dismantle it in a moment of revelation. That was not manipulation. That was a specific kind of care — the kind that cost the person doing it something rather than nothing.
He listened to her voice in Episode 64 saying: March in Seoul insists on things.
He thought: I know that voice. He had known that voice for six months. He had told that voice things he had never told a room of people or a therapist or the oldest friend he had in the world. The voice had not changed when what lay behind it changed.
It was a million tiny little things, he thought — and the thought arrived not as a sentence but as a weight, a collection, the accumulated mass of Tuesday and Friday and Singapore and Paris and Seoul in the snow and the room I recognize and come home when you can — and when you added them all up, they were the shape of something that meant: we were supposed to be here.
He sent a message through the portal on Friday morning.
[PORTAL MESSAGE — FRIDAY, APRIL 1]
I'm not angry. I want to be clear about that first.
I've been thinking about what it would feel like to have someone know something about me and choose to keep the room safe rather than do anything with the knowing. I've been in situations where people knew things about me and the knowing immediately became something they used — for access, for leverage, for content, for the feeling of being adjacent to something. I've been around that for six years.
You knew. You sat with it for three weeks and you kept Tuesday and Friday exactly as they were, and you kept the voice notes private when I asked, and you said things on air that were directed at me without ever making it about me in a way that cost me anything.
That's not nothing. That's the opposite of nothing.
I want to ask you something: do you listen to the music? Not in a — I'm not asking for approval. I'm asking because I'm trying to understand what you knew before you knew who I was. How much of what you thought you understood about me was correct. Because I'm afraid that what you actually heard in the voice notes and what gets performed in the other context are so different that I'm asking you to believe in the voice without the face and I don't know if that's fair.
She read this twice and then put the phone down and thought for a long time.
Then she typed:
I listened to the album three times before I knew. I thought it was about insomnia, which it partly is, and about the loneliness of travel, and about something I recognized from the podcast but didn't connect. The open window song — I had feelings about it that I was trying not to articulate.
The voice in the notes and the voice in the music are different in production and context and purpose. But underneath both of them: same person. Same rhythm. Same silences.
I'm not in love with your work. I'm in love with a man who lay on hotel floors in European cities and sent me notes about not being able to sleep.
She stared at what she had written for a long time.
She sent it.
She put the phone face-down.
Her hands were shaking very slightly, which was unusual, because she had good emotional regulation as a general rule.
The response came eleven minutes later.
I'd like to be in the same city without the microphone between us. I know I asked before, and things were different then. I'm asking again.
Is Saturday okay.
Chapter Fifteen: April — The Other Side of the Glass
The place he suggested was a small coffee shop in Yeonnam-dong that he had described, three months earlier in a voice note, as one of the only places in Seoul where he felt invisible enough to think. He had not given the name. He had described it precisely enough that she had found it — the one with the green door and the records on the walls and the table by the second window that caught the light in the late afternoon.
She recognized it immediately because she had been there twice.
She arrived seven minutes early and sat at the table by the second window and ordered a coffee with both hands wrapped around the cup, because her hands were still doing the slight thing from the night before, which she was attributing to general circumstance and not specifically to what she was about to do.
It was a Saturday in April. The cherry blossoms along the streets had peaked and begun to fall, which meant the streets looked like what April believed about itself, and the light was doing the thing it did at four in the afternoon in this city where it came in at an angle that made everything look like it was being remembered rather than currently occurring.
She was watching the door.
He came in at 4:08.
She knew him immediately, and not from his face, which she had looked at exactly once before putting the phone away. She knew him from the quality of his attention — the way he scanned the room not with the alert defensiveness of someone used to being recognized, but with a specific looking that was clearly searching for one thing. That particular searching stillness. She had heard it in his silences. She knew it in his body.
He found her.
The moment was nothing like what the movies would do with it — no swelling music, no clean emotional detonation, no dialogue landing with practiced weight. It was simply a man and a woman looking at each other across a small coffee shop for the first time, and the look containing everything that a voice contains: recognition. Relief. The particular terror of having finally arrived somewhere you have been trying to reach for a long time.
He walked to the table. He sat down across from her.
They looked at each other.
"Hi," she said. Her voice was exactly as it sounded on the podcast — warm, careful, with that slight husk of someone who was being honest in real time.
"Hi," he said.
His voice. She had listened to his voice for six months in the dark, and now it was three feet away from her, directed entirely at her, in a room that smelled like coffee and old records, with the April light coming in at the right angle for a thing that was happening that mattered.
It was like coming home to a place she had never been.
She knew that was too much to think within the first fifteen seconds of meeting someone. She thought it anyway.
He had not known what to expect. He had run through versions in his head, the way he ran through scenarios before anything high-stakes — concert openings, media appearances, meetings where the thing on the table was larger than the thing being said. He had imagined various configurations of the meeting: awkward and tender, or formal-becoming-warm, or the particular disaster of reality failing to match six months of constructed feeling.
She was not what he had imagined, and she was also exactly what he had imagined, which was the confusing thing — the way you could know something from a voice so well that the face was simultaneously a surprise and an inevitability.
She had red-chestnut hair and dark eyes and she was holding her coffee cup with both hands wrapped around it in a way that suggested she was cold or nervous or both, and she was looking at him with an expression he recognized from the podcast in a way that was strange, because this was not a face he had heard before. But the expression — that combination of directness and restraint, the thing that opened and then carefully managed the opening — that he knew.
"I listened to Episode 64 four times," he said, because the first thing that came out of his mouth might as well be true.
"I know which part you listened to," she said.
"The March one. The seasons-insisting."
"That was for you."
"I know."
A pause. The coffee shop moved around them — two students at a laptop, a couple near the window, the record player on the counter spinning something old and warm.
"I want to say something," he said, "and I want to say it before we figure out the rest of it, because I think the rest is complicated and I want to say the simple thing first."
She waited. She was good at waiting. He had known this about her.
"When I listen to your voice," he said, "I feel like myself. Not the self I carry around. The one underneath. The one that's still there."
She looked at him for a moment.
"I know," she said. "Your notes do that for me too."
"I know," he said. "You said so. Episode 59."
They looked at each other, and then — simultaneously, and with the slight inevitability of two people who have been circling the same frequency for six months — they both smiled. Not the big public smile she had seen in photographs. A smaller one. The real one.
They talked for three hours.
This was not romantic in the cinematic sense, which was perhaps the most romantic thing about it — no confession scene, no dramatic crossing of the room. They talked the way people talk when they have been saving things up: with the relief of a pressure released, conversation flowing in multiple directions at once, looping back, going deeper. He talked about the tour with the specificity of someone who had been waiting to describe it to someone who would actually hear it. She talked about the podcast the way she had never talked about it to anyone — the things she chose, and why, and what the listener community meant to her.
He knew the specific episodes. He had opinions about her editing choices. He quoted a line back at her from six months ago, word for word, and she looked at him with an expression that was surprise and also not surprise.
"You have a very good memory," she said.
"I have a very good reason," he said.
And she looked at the table and then back at him and they understood each other.
She walked home at seven in the evening through the April streets with cherry blossom petals on the pavement beneath her feet, and she called Mira.
"Well?" Mira said.
"He knows the episodes by number," Hazel said.
A pause.
"Hazel," Mira said.
"I know," Hazel said.
"You're okay?"
"I'm more than okay," she said. "I'm — I'm something without a clean name."
"Geurium?"
"No. The opposite. The thing geurium is the missing of. The presence. The having-arrived."
Another pause, different quality.
"Good," Mira said. "I'm very, very glad."
"Me too," Hazel said.
She kept walking. The petals fell. The city held her, as it always had — generous and awake and indifferent to the enormous things that happened quietly inside it, as enormous things always do.
PART Ⅴ: THE COST OF BEING FOUND
Chapter Sixteen: Public
Hazel had been naive in exactly one respect, and it was a large one.
She had believed — had allowed herself to believe, in the specific hopefulness of the first weeks, when everything was contained and careful and new — that the fan community's theory about the anonymous caller had been speculative enough to remain speculative. Unconfirmed. A theory among theories.
She had underestimated, significantly, the collective intelligence of eight thousand observant people with time, search tools, and genuine investment.
The photograph was taken on their third Saturday meeting, at a different café — one further from Juhoon's usual territory, in a quiet alley in Seongbuk-dong that neither of them had been to before. It was a single photograph, slightly blurred, taken from outside through glass. It showed two people at a table: a young man whose face was partially turned away but identifiable to anyone who had been looking, and a young woman with red-chestnut hair and both hands around a coffee cup.
It appeared on a fan forum on a Sunday morning.
By Monday it had appeared on three Korean entertainment news sites.
By Tuesday it had been picked up by international K-pop coverage.
By Wednesday Hazel had been identified.
The identification was not difficult, in the end. She was a foreign student at a specific university. Her voice was on eighty-eight episodes of a podcast that a large number of people were now searching with the specific intention of finding. Someone found a faculty photo of her from a university event. Someone cross-referenced her voice with the podcast. Someone matched the podcast's general Mangwon geography to the area of the photograph.
The comments were varied. This was the diplomatic way to say it.
Some were warm: she sounds incredible, I've been listening all week. Some were curious: the podcast really is beautiful, you can understand why he likes it. Some were protective of Juhoon in a way that was explicitly hostile toward Hazel: she obviously knew who he was the whole time, this is a manipulation. Some were simply the undifferentiated noise of mass attention, which had no particular content but a quantity that made the podcast inbox unsustainable.
Hazel's listener numbers went from eighty-eight thousand to four hundred thousand in four days.
She did not upload an episode that week. She could not.
She heard from Juhoon's management first — a call from Park Jiyoung, who was professional and efficient and did not make it hostile but made it very clear that the situation required management on multiple fronts, and that the company's position was that both parties should refrain from public statement until a strategy was developed.
She heard from Juhoon second — a message through the portal, which felt, in the circumstances, like someone choosing a room they trusted over one they had been handed.
I'm sorry. I know that's not enough. I'm sorry this came at you this way. Are you okay.
She was not okay. She was the specific kind of not-okay that came from having your quiet careful life suddenly made visible and contested and treated as a narrative by people who had no knowledge of its actual content.
She wrote back:
I'm managing. How are you managing.
They want me to not respond publicly. I disagree. But I understand the argument for it.
What do you want to do?
she wrote.
A pause.
I want to tell them it was real and tell them to be kind to you. I don't know if that helps or hurts.
What Juhoon was not writing to her, because he could not say it without it becoming something he wasn't ready to name, was that the week after the photograph had been the worst one in recent memory — not because of the news cycle, which he had lived through versions of before, but because Martin had knocked on his door on a Tuesday evening and sat down on his couch with the specific expression of a leader who had been quietly watching something develop for months and had now decided that watching was no longer the appropriate posture.
"I listened to it," Martin said.
Juhoon did not ask what.
"The whole archive," Martin said. "I started from the beginning on Sunday." He paused. "She's good, Juhoon. She's really good."
"I know," Juhoon said.
"I listened to the notes you sent her."
"I know."
Martin was quiet for a moment. He had a quality when he was being honest that was different from his performance of honesty — a stillness, something that stopped reaching for effect. It was the quality Juhoon trusted most in him.
"The one from Paris," he said. "About being homesick for a place you've never been."
Juhoon said nothing.
"I didn't know you felt like that," Martin said. "I've been here the whole time and I didn't know."
"It's not — it's not something I could have said in a room," Juhoon said. "That's the whole thing. That was the whole point of it."
Martin nodded slowly, like someone processing the logic of a feeling he hadn't been equipped to receive before.
"Okay," he said. "I get it." He looked at Juhoon directly. "She's real. What you were doing in there was real. I just wanted to say that out loud, because I think you need someone to say it who isn't on the other side of a screen."
Juhoon looked at his hands.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't thank me. Fix it." Martin stood up, with the efficiency of someone who had said the thing and was not going to dilute it by staying too long. "Also Seonghyeon went down a three-hour rabbit hole of the podcast and now he keeps quoting it at me in context. That's on you."
Despite everything, Juhoon laughed.
It was the first time in a week he had laughed at something real.
She sat with this for a while.
Let me think, she wrote.
Chapter Seventeen: The Betrayal She Hadn't Expected
The version of the story that became dominant — the one repeated and reframed across entertainment news cycles and fan forums and social media comment threads — was that Hazel had knowingly pursued a famous person through the guise of an anonymous podcast, had cultivated a relationship while maintaining false ignorance of his identity, and had used the podcast as a platform to launder proximity into intimacy.
This version was wrong. It was also extremely coherent and emotionally satisfying as a story, which made it difficult to displace.
What the version got wrong — what the version necessarily elided — was the order of things. Which was the entire point. She had not known. She had built the room before he arrived. She had fallen in love with the voice before the face, and the face had been a discovery, and the discovery had frightened her before it had done anything else.
The version did not know this. The version had access only to a photograph through a coffee shop window, and a podcast that now had four hundred thousand listeners going through it looking for evidence of design.
She understood, in a way she had not before, what it was to have your interior life narrated by people outside it. She had a new and bone-deep sympathy for what Juhoon had been trying to say in November about the glass — the one you stood behind watching yourself be interpreted.
She also understood, in a way she had not anticipated and did not know how to frame yet, what it felt like to wonder about the version of the story that was wrong.
Not the public version. The private one.
The question she had asked herself in the beginning and then set aside: had the anonymity been the point, or had she been? Was she the room, or was she the person?
She knew, in her honest 3 a.m. self, what she believed. But knowledge and fear coexisted. They had always coexisted in her — she was a person made of careful knowing and still-present fear, and she had made her peace with that most of the time.
Most of the time.
She sent him a message on a Thursday, twelve days after the photograph.
[PORTAL MESSAGE — THURSDAY, APRIL 21]
I've been thinking about something, and I want to say it clearly because I think we owe each other clarity in proportion to how much we've owed each other honesty.
I don't want to be someone you're settling for. I don't mean that the way it sounds at first — I don't mean settling as in compromise. I mean: I don't want to be the version that was safe and anonymous and required nothing from you except what you chose to give. I don't want to be the podcast. I want to be the person.
But I'm also — I'm afraid that the podcast was the person, and that the person is not separate from it, and that when the podcast becomes four hundred thousand strangers looking for a story, the person inside it gets — smaller. Less distinct. I am afraid of being less distinct.
I know who you are now. I knew before, but now I know it differently — I know it the way the world knows it, which is a lot of information and very little of it true. And I'm afraid that the world's version of you is going to be the version I'm dealing with now, and not the man on the floor in Singapore who sent me a note about rain.
Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me what's actually happening in there. Not the version that gets managed. The floor version.
The response came two hours later, which was fast by his standards — she had learned the timing of his thinking.
[PORTAL MESSAGE — THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 11:52 P.M.]
The floor version is this:
I am frightened that you are going to decide that the distance between our lives is not crossable and that the math is wrong and that I am too much — not as a person, but as a thing to be attached to in the world. I am frightened that the month the world spent narrating us has cost you something you didn't choose to spend.
I am frightened that you heard the voice and the voice was enough, and then the voice got a body with a world attached to it, and the world is not what you signed up for.
I do not know how to make the world smaller. I have been trying to do that for six years. I have not succeeded.
What I know: the man in Singapore is the same one who sat across from you in the café. He had different things to carry around him, but he's the same. The floor version and the performance version are the same person in different weather. You have met both. You know which one is which.
I'm not settling. I'm the opposite of settling. I have spent six years in rooms built by other people and you were the first room I walked into that felt like mine.
You asked me to tell you what's actually happening in there. That's what's happening in there.
Tell me what to do next.
She read this four times.
She sat in the quiet of her apartment with the city breathing through the window and the radiator muttering under the sill and the April darkness holding everything at arm's length except the thing it couldn't hold, which was this.
She had told Mira she was afraid of being the container. She had been.
She had told herself she was afraid the anonymity had been the point. She had been.
And now she had his words on a screen at midnight — the first room I walked into that felt like mine — and the fear was still there, the way fear is always still there, but it was smaller than the other thing, which was this:
She believed him.
She typed:
Come to Friday's episode. Not on air. Just come to where I am. I'll leave the window open.
Chapter Eighteen: Friday
He knew the neighborhood but not the building. She sent him the address through the portal at 10 p.m. on Friday, with a message that said: fourth floor. The light will be on.
She had considered, on the way home from campus that day, what she would say. She had arrived at: nothing prepared. Prepared things were a performance and she was done with performances, was actively evacuating them from her life. She was going to be exactly who she was in the dark at 2 a.m. with the microphone and the open window, which was the truest version available.
She set up for recording at midnight — the usual spot, the usual microphone, the window open to April. She pressed record and began talking about the city.
She talked for twelve minutes. About rain in Mangwon. About the cherry blossoms that were finished now, turned to leaves that didn't announce themselves, just quietly continued. About loneliness not as a weather condition this time but as a language — something you became fluent in, that let you recognize when someone was speaking it, that created the specific grammar of understanding between two people who had been practicing in the same room.
She heard the buzzer at 12:23 a.m.
She pressed pause. She went to the intercom and let him in and stood at the open door of her apartment while he came up the stairs — fifth floor, no elevator, and she heard him take them with a deliberateness that told her he was not rushing. Either because he was tired or because he understood that this moment, like the good moments, required a different pace.
He appeared at the top of the stairs.
He was wearing an ordinary coat. A hat he hadn't bothered to pull low, because it was 12:23 a.m. and the building was empty. He looked — she searched for the word and found it exactly: himself. The floor version. The one underneath.
She stepped back. He came in.
She had tidied the apartment, which was not its usual state, which was comfortable-and-lived-in; she had returned it to comfortable-and-lived-in after tidying it and then deciding that tidying it was itself a performance. The microphone was on its stand. The window was open. The radiator was doing its thing. The city was audible in the specific way it was audible on eighty-eight episodes of Sleepless in Seoul, which he knew well enough to have described it once as sounding like a city that had made peace with being awake.
He stood in the middle of the room and looked around.
"It's exactly like I imagined," he said. "Smaller."
"Everyone says that," she said.
"I'm not — I mean it as a compliment. It fits you. It fits the voice."
She looked at him standing in the middle of her small exact apartment and thought of all the things he had said in the dark, in the private portal messages and the voice notes and the episode where he had said I think I might be homesick for a place I've never been and she had thought: I know exactly what you mean.
"Sit down," she said. "I was in the middle of recording."
He sat on the edge of her bed — the only available sitting surface — with the particular care of someone who was trying not to displace anything. She sat back in her chair and looked at the microphone and then at him.
"Can I keep going?" she said.
He looked at her steadily.
"Yes," he said.
She pressed record.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 67 — FRIDAY, APRIL 29 [HOST]
"It's after midnight. The city is doing its city things — delivery bikes, a distant siren, the specific wet-street sound of cars on wet asphalt after rain.
I have something to tell you, and I'm going to tell it as directly as I know how to, which means I'm going to start in the wrong place and find my way to the right one.
Six months ago, someone started sending voice notes to this podcast. I don't know if you remember. Some of you do, based on the comments. He was a man who couldn't sleep — which is how most of you found me — and he spoke carefully, the way someone speaks when they are afraid of using more words than they mean. He talked about hotels and cities and the specific loneliness of being surrounded. He asked questions he answered himself.
Over six months, I fell in love with his voice.
I want to be clear about the order of operations: I fell in love with a voice, and then a voice note became a written message, and a written message became a café on a Saturday, and a café on a Saturday became someone sitting on the edge of my bed at 12:30 a.m. while I finish recording.
I know that some of you have been part of a story about us that has gotten a lot of things in the wrong order. I understand why the wrong order felt more like a story. I understand the grammar of suspicion. I've felt it myself — the particular fear that a thing you love was built rather than found.
But I want to say this clearly, into the microphone, for the record, for the night:
It was built. Everything good is built. You build it one small honest thing at a time, until you look at what you've made and realize it has the shape of something that feels like home.
It was also found. Because you don't get to choose which voices reach you through the dark, or which ones fit the exact shape of the missing place in your chest.
Both things are true. Both things were ours.
I'm not going to say his name. He can introduce himself if he wants to. But he's here, and this room is his too, and I wanted you to know that some things that start in the dark end up in the light, and the light doesn't change them — it just lets you see what was already there."
She stopped recording.
The silence had a particular quality — the specific silence that follows the truest thing you've said in a room.
She looked at him.
He had been very still while she spoke. His hands on his knees, his head very slightly bowed. The specific stillness she recognized from his silences on the voice notes, when something had landed and he was in the process of receiving it.
He looked up.
His face was doing something she hadn't seen yet — hadn't seen in the photograph or the café or the three hours of talking or the twelve days of distance. Something that had come unstuck.
"You said it out loud," he said.
"Yes."
"On the podcast."
"Yes."
"To four hundred thousand people."
"Plus the ones who don't listen live and will find it Saturday."
Something moved across his face that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one — the relief of something long-held finally put down.
"I didn't know if you were going to do that," he said.
"Neither did I, until I did."
He stood up. He was not particularly dramatic about it. He crossed the three feet of apartment between the bed and the recording chair with the care of someone who had been practicing arrival for a long time.
He stopped just in front of her. Close enough to see the small scar above her left eyebrow that she had mentioned, three episodes ago, in the context of a childhood story about a bicycle. Close enough to be in the room rather than adjacent to it.
"I want to say something on the record," he said.
She looked up at him.
"Say it," she said.
"My name is Kim Juhoon." He said it with the slight formality of someone who had not said his name unperformed in a very long time. "I'm from Incheon. I'm twenty-six years old. I cannot sleep in hotels and I have six plants and I prefer the floor to the bed when I'm thinking, and I've been in love with a podcast host since November, which is not something I expected to be able to say to her face."
He paused.
"Also," he said, "your apartment is exactly what I imagined."
"You said it was smaller."
"I said it was smaller than I imagined. That's not a criticism. I'm bad at scale."
She laughed — surprised, real, unguarded in the way she was only at 2 a.m. when the performance had fallen away. He had heard that laugh in exactly one episode when she had forgotten herself describing a pigeon that had walked directly through a café with the confidence of someone who had made a reservation. He had listened to it three times.
He reached out and took her hand.
The city breathed through the window. The radiator muttered. Somewhere below, a delivery bike turned a corner and was gone.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," she said.
PART Ⅵ: AFTER MIDNIGHT — THE SHAPE OF HOME
Chapter Nineteen: May
May arrived, as it always does, with the quality of a season that has remembered what it was supposed to be.
The tree at the corner of Hazel's street — a ginkgo that had been bare in November and gold in October and bare again in February — was fully green now, deeply and specifically green, the particular green of something that has been through winter and has come back with the knowledge of having come back. The evenings were long and warm and the city was doing what it did in spring, which was to believe in itself with renewed enthusiasm.
Three things happened in May.
The first was that Hazel's listener numbers stabilized at two hundred and forty thousand, which was not the four hundred thousand of the scandal's peak but was triple what she had before, and the quality of the listener base had improved in the way that things improve when the casual observers move on and the genuine ones remain. The comments section was, largely, full of people who had found the podcast for the wrong reasons and stayed for the right ones — who had come looking for a story and found something stranger and quieter and more honest than a story.
The second was that Juhoon appeared on a podcast interview — a different one, a music industry one — and was asked about the past month and gave an answer that became, briefly, the top trending clip in the entertainment category for four days:
"I listened to a podcast for six months. It helped me sleep, which sounds simple. It was not simple. I think sometimes you find the frequency of a person before you find the person — you understand what they are before you understand who they are. That's what happened. And I think it means that when you arrive at the actual person, you already know them in the most important way."
The interviewer had asked whether the podcast in question was Sleepless in Seoul.
He had smiled with the small real smile and said: "I think you already know that."
The clip received fourteen million views.
The third thing was that Hazel finished recording Episode 72 at 1:45 a.m. on a Tuesday and turned the microphone off and found Juhoon asleep on her bed — not having planned to be, but simply having been there since eleven and having drifted off somewhere in the middle of Episode 71's playback editing, which she took as a compliment of the highest order: to fall asleep somewhere was to trust it.
She stood in the doorway of her own bedroom and looked at him sleeping and thought about the million tiny little things. The voice note from Singapore. The conversation about geurium. The Paris hotel room. The floor at 3 a.m. The green door in Yeonnam-dong. The sound of him coming up five flights of stairs at 12:23 a.m. on a Friday night in April, not rushing.
It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, meant they were supposed to be here. Not in some predestined cosmic sense. In the sense that people build inevitabilities from choices, from frequencies, from the specific habit of being honest in the dark until the dark becomes something you can live in together.
She turned off the overhead light. She sat in her recording chair with the window open and the city breathing and wrote the first paragraph of Episode 72 by hand in the notebook she kept for drafts:
Tonight I want to talk about home as a verb.
Epilogue: Sleepless in Seoul— Episode 75
TRANSCRIPT — TUESDAY, JUNE 7 — 2:08 A.M.
"It's raining in Seoul tonight. I know I've said that before. I say it every time it's true because it's always true in a slightly different way, and tonight it's the warm summer rain that arrives without warning and doesn't particularly care whether you have an umbrella.
I've been doing this for almost two years. Seventy-five episodes. I started talking into a microphone at 2 a.m. because I couldn't sleep and I liked my city and I needed somewhere to put things, and what I found was that a lot of you couldn't sleep either, and needed somewhere too, and that the somewhere could be shared.
I want to say something I haven't said in exactly this way before.
Thank you. For being awake with me. For sending voice notes at 1 a.m. and trusting the dark with things you hadn't said out loud. For the woman in Busan who called herself Insomniac No. 4 and who I know is listening tonight because she told me she always does. For the student with the plants. For the man in Itaewon who misses his kids in a way that makes my throat tight every single time. For everyone who arrived at this podcast looking for something and found a different thing than they expected.
Some of you found love here, at least one of you has told me. Some of you found the word for what you were feeling. Some of you found permission to not be okay, which is a different and equally important thing.
I found something too.
I want to talk about what I found, briefly, at the risk of making something private public in a way it isn't quite ready for — but the risk feels worth it because the people who listen at 2 a.m. are the people who can be trusted with the soft things.
I found that love arrives in the order it arrives. Not when you plan for it. Not in the form you're prepared for. It arrives in voices before faces, in honesty before names, in the specific recognition of a silence that fits your own silences.
I found that being known — really known, below the version you carry around — is not a disaster. It is, it turns out, the thing we were all awake looking for.
I'm still looking for a lot of things. I'm still awake at 2 a.m. with the window open. But I am looking in the right direction.
The frequency, if you're listening, is still on.
Come home when you can.
Sleepless in Seoul will be back Friday. Keep the window open. I'll be here."
[FROM THE PODCAST INBOX — RECEIVED TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2:31 A.M.]
[NOT AIRED — KEPT]
"I'm here.
I heard the episode. I heard all of them, every single one, and I will keep hearing them for as long as you keep making them.
The frequency is still on. I'm still on it.
Come find me in the morning. I'll make coffee.
— J"
[RESPONSE — SENT 2:34 A.M.]
"The window is open.
Good night.
— H"
THE END
Author's Note on the novel's epigraph:
The line "It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, meant we were supposed to be together" is adapted from Sleepless in Seattle (1993, dir. Nora Ephron). This novel is written in admiration of Ephron's belief that love is specific, cumulative, and — above all — worth the waiting.
a novel — seoul, late nights, a voice you'd know anywhere
for everyone who has fallen in love with a voice before a face
"It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, meant we were supposed to be together."
SYNOPSIS! Hazel runs a tiny anonymous late-night podcast for insomniacs, and she is very careful not to fall in love with any of her callers — until one keeps coming back. His voice is low and tired and tells her things he's never told anyone: about hotel rooms in cities that don't feel like his, about being surrounded by thousands of people and feeling profoundly, completely alone. She falls for him slowly, then all at once, long before she learns who he actually is. Kim Juhoon is one of the most famous idols in the country, and he has been waiting for her uploads the same way she waits for his voice notes, and neither of them has any idea what to do about that.
tags! slow burn, angst, fluff, idol au, strangers to lovers, found family, hurt/comfort don't worry fam i got your back, no kissing cuz i'm against writing allat for a young kid, podcast au, seoul, insomnia, happy ending because our realities are too sad already, tweaked personalities of members to fit the plot, juhoon and oc are not eighteen - they're older, and yes inspired by the classic romcom:- sleepless in seattle, definitely my best written work. w.c: approx 20k;
this is gonna be long but i promise its so worth it :)
PART Ⅰ: THE FREQUENCY OF LONELINESS
Chapter One: Hazel
The apartment was the kind of small that required a certain philosophy to inhabit comfortably.
Hazel Harper had developed hers over two years: she did not accumulate things that could not be carried in a single trip. She owned seven books at a time — no more, no fewer — rotating them out of a secondhand shop on the corner of Mangwon-dong where the owner, a woman in her seventies named Choi Soonim, had taken to setting aside anything that arrived with a faded English spine. She owned two mugs, one good coat, and a microphone that cost more than her monthly food budget, which told you almost everything about her priorities.
Her name was Hazel Harper and she was twenty three old and she could not sleep.
This was not a new condition. She had been an insomniac since childhood — since the particular night she was eleven years old and had lain awake listening to her parents' voices travel through the thin walls of their house in Portland, Oregon, all the way to the kitchen, where they discussed quietly and with great civility the dissolution of their marriage. There had been something about that night — the specific quality of their voices, low and careful and trying so hard to be kind — that had stayed with her like a frequency she could never quite tune out. She had been listening for something ever since. She was never sure what.
She had come to Seoul on a language scholarship. She stayed because Seoul at night felt like it understood her.
There was a particular hour — somewhere between 1 and 3 a.m. — when the city changed its face. The daytime crowds dissolved. The glow of convenience stores became something almost sacred, those little rectangles of fluorescence standing sentinel against the dark. The Han River bridges reflected their lights in the black water below, doubling themselves, becoming twice as beautiful and half as real. Drunk businessmen helped each other home like two-legged creatures that had forgotten how to be singular. Couples sat on the steps of closed restaurants and talked too softly to overhear. Delivery scooters moved through empty intersections like small ships.
Hazel loved all of it with a ferocity that surprised her. She loved that she could walk home from the convenience store at two in the morning and feel the city still breathing, still pulsing, still very much alive. She loved that Seoul did not require her to explain why she was awake. The city itself was always awake. It understood.
She had started the podcast eighteen months ago, almost by accident.
She had not intended for it to become anything. She had a decent microphone — bought with a summer's worth of tutoring money because she loved the weight and specificity of good audio equipment — and an account on a small hosting platform, and an inability to sleep, and one night in November she had simply pressed record and started talking. She talked about the rain. She talked about a noodle shop on her corner that closed at midnight and always left a light on in the kitchen, and how she had begun to find that light comforting in a way she could not entirely rationalize. She talked about loneliness not as a complaint but as a weather condition — something you dressed appropriately for rather than tried to prevent.
She posted it at 2 a.m. She titled the podcast Sleepless in Seoul and did not attach her name or face to it.
She had expected nothing. She had received, within a week, forty-seven messages from people who could not sleep.
The podcast grew slowly, the way honest things tend to grow — without strategy, without a plan, through the word-of-mouth of exhausted people who had found something in the dark that felt like company. By the time Hazel was a year in, she had a small but devoted listenership of perhaps eight hundred people. They sent voice notes. They sent confessions. They sent small and enormous things: breakup stories, immigration anxieties, the particular grief of missing dead grandmothers, the particular loneliness of loving someone who did not love you back, the specific relief of admitting out loud, in the dark, that you were not entirely fine.
She aired the ones with permission and kept all the others with the same care she imagined a priest might keep confessions — private, weightless, given somewhere safe.
The format was simple. Hazel spoke for ten minutes at the top of each episode — the city, the hour, whatever was in her head. Then she played a selection of listener voice notes, anonymized, their voices unaltered. Sometimes she responded gently. Sometimes she just let them breathe in the air between her observations.
She ran it on Tuesday and Friday nights.
She had never missed an episode.
She had also never told anyone she did it.
Not her best friend Mira, who was a graphic design student with opinions about everything and would have had opinions about this. Not her university friends, who would have been supportive in a way that required performance. Not even her mother back in Portland, who would have worried about her being awake at 2 a.m. talking to strangers. It was hers — entirely, completely, privately hers — and she had grown fiercely protective of that.
On the particular Tuesday night that begins this story, Hazel was sitting cross-legged on her narrow bed with the microphone on its small stand before her, a cup of barley tea on the windowsill going cold. The window was open a crack despite the October chill, because she liked the sound of distant traffic in her recordings — a specific quality of ambience, urban and alive and quietly insomniac.
She had been talking for eight minutes about the smell of autumn in Seoul — something she had missed entirely in the abstract of missing seasons, which turned out to have their own personality in this city, their own particular combination of ginkgo and rain and the ghost of summer's humidity still faintly present — when she queued up the first voice note.
It was from someone new.
She knew this because she had a small enough listener base to recognize the regulars: the woman in Busan who called herself Insomniac No. 4 and sent notes about her divorce, the student in Daejeon who reported on his nighttime conversations with his plants, the middle-aged man in Itaewon who spoke about his adult children with a tenderness that made Hazel's throat tighten reliably every single time.
This was a new voice.
It was a man's voice, low and careful, and there was a quality to it that she noticed immediately — not what he said, which was simple enough, but the way he said it. Like someone choosing his words very deliberately. Like someone who was used to speaking carefully and was choosing to stop.
"I found this podcast," he said, "and I'm not sure why I'm sending a note. I don't do things like this."
A pause.
"I've been awake for forty hours, more or less, and I'm in a hotel room in a city that isn't mine — which is most of them, these days. I can hear the city outside the window. I don't know if that's comforting or not. It's something. It's better than silence."
Another pause, longer.
"I heard you talking about the rain. I like rain."
That was all.
Hazel stared at the audio file for a moment before playing it on air. She pressed her thumb against her chin, the way she did when she was thinking. Then she smiled slightly — not broadly, but with the particular warmth she felt when someone arrived at the podcast for the first time and couldn't quite explain why.
She played it. She spoke afterward, not directly to him, but in his general direction, the way you might speak to a cat that had wandered in from the cold and was deciding whether to stay.
"Forty hours is a long time to be awake," she said. "I hope wherever you are, the rain finds you."
She did not think about it again for three days.
Chapter Two: Juhoon
The hotel room was in Singapore.
He remembered that much: the specific quality of the air conditioning, and the view from the window, which was glass-and-steel architecture rising out of tropical air. He had been in Singapore for four days and had seen none of it except through car windows and the back of a venue. He had performed to forty thousand people two nights ago and had come offstage and sat in his dressing room in silence for twenty minutes before anyone noticed he had not moved.
His name was Kim Juhoon, though the world knew him as JH, which was the name his management had given him when he was eighteen and Cortis debuted and he had been too young and too grateful and too terrified to have any opinion about it. He was twenty-six now, and the name still belonged to him, but it fit differently than it used to — like a coat he had been wearing long enough that he no longer noticed its weight, until suddenly he did.
Cortis was five members. They had debuted six years ago with a song that climbed to the top of the domestic charts in three days and the international charts in seven, and the trajectory had never really stopped. There were award shows and world tours and stadium concerts and brand deals and reality shows and fan meetings and interviews and photoshoots and schedules that arrived as printed documents and were treated as binding law. There were people who knew what time he woke up and what he ate and when he was tired, and none of them were the people he wanted to know these things.
He had sent the voice note on a Tuesday night in Singapore, having found the podcast entirely by chance — someone in a fan forum he occasionally browsed anonymously had linked it in a thread about things that helped with tour insomnia, and he had clicked through without much expectation and found himself listening to a woman's voice talk about rain in Seoul, and something about it had made him go very still.
Not because it was remarkable. It was quiet and sincere and not especially profound, and yet it made him feel, for the first time in what felt like months, like he was in a room with a person rather than a production.
He sent the note. He did not know why. He did not usually do impulsive things. His life had very little room for impulsive things.
He was asleep before the episode aired, but he found it the next morning on his phone, sitting in the back of a van on the way to a press event, earbuds in, while Martin read aloud from his phone the schedule for the following day with the tone of someone performing a dramatic monologue, and James leaned his head against the window with his eyes closed in the way of a person who had decided the morning was happening to someone else, and Juhoon pressed his thumb against the volume dial and listened to a voice say, quietly and without drama: I hope wherever you are, the rain finds you.
He had to look out the window because he was not sure what his face was doing.
He was the quiet one, in Cortis. This was known. It was, in fact, documented — fan wikis detailed the members' personalities with the clinical precision of naturalists cataloguing wildlife, and Juhoon's entry noted that he was thoughtful, reserved, rarely the first to speak in group settings, occasionally given to silences that other members had learned to interpret. He was not the one who told stories at variety show appearances. He was not the one who produced comedic chaos in reality show footage. He was the one who, in their most famous concert film, could be seen standing at the edge of the stage between songs, looking out at the audience with an expression that the internet had been trying to name for four years. Some called it melancholy. Some called it intensity. One particularly long and earnest forum post had called it the look of a man remembering something he hasn't experienced yet.
He had read that once, at three in the morning, and had felt uncomfortably seen by a stranger on the internet.
He had good people around him, which was not nothing. James, the oldest, carried himself with the steadiness of someone who had spent years learning how to survive pressure without making a performance of it — sharp in rehearsal, unexpectedly patient in private, the sort of person who noticed when someone was quiet and chose not to embarrass them for it. Martin, their leader, possessed a warmth that expanded to fill whatever room they were in; loud when the moment called for it, perceptive when it didn’t, with an instinct for people that made the others trust him almost automatically. Seonghyeon moved through the world with a quieter kind of intelligence, observant and dryly funny, the kind of person who seemed to be thinking three conversations ahead while still listening carefully to the one in front of him. And Keonho, the youngest, all restless energy and impossible charisma, had the unnerving habit of throwing himself entirely into whatever fascinated him that week — choreography at three in the morning, a melody half-finished on his phone, a sudden conviction that everyone else needed to hear it immediately.
Together they formed a strange, functional balance: Martin pulling people outward, James keeping them grounded, Seonghyeon watching everything, Keonho feeling everything at full volume. It should have been chaotic. Somehow, most days, it worked.
He loved them, genuinely and without reservation — four people he spent most of his time with. But even with them, there was a version of himself that Juhoon kept folded away — the version that woke up sometimes in hotels and genuinely could not remember what city he was in, or what day it was, or what he wanted, or when he had last wanted something for himself rather than for the work or the group or the schedule.
He did not know the words for this. He had tried, sometimes, with therapists his management arranged — two of them over three years, careful and professional and bound by something that made him feel like his honesty would be processed and filed. He had stopped going. He had not told his management he stopped going.
He was not unhappy. He wanted to be clear about this, even in the interior monologue of his own thoughts: he was not unhappy. He loved the music. He loved performing. He loved, genuinely and without reservation, the members, he spent most of his time with. His life had meaning and beauty and more material comfort than he had any right to expect from a childhood in a small apartment in Incheon, where his father had worked at a factory and his mother had cleaned offices and they had been careful — always careful — with small amounts of money.
He was not unhappy. He was simply not present. There was a version of him that moved through schedules and performed and gave interviews and attended meetings, and then there was the rest of him, which seemed to exist in a parallel frequency — awake at wrong hours, looking at cities through glass, reaching for a quality of aliveness that he could feel just at the edge of his awareness, like a song he couldn't quite hear.
He started listening to Sleepless in Seoul on a Sunday. By Thursday of that same week he had listened to every episode in the archive — forty-three of them, going back eighteen months — and was waiting for the next one with a specific anticipation that felt strange and clean, like something he hadn't felt in a long time.
He sent another note the following Tuesday.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 44 — TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]
"I listened to your old episodes. I don't know if that's a normal thing to do — probably not, since you said in one of them that you had been surprised anyone found them at all. I found them.
The one from February, where you talked about watching a couple argue on the subway at midnight — I listened to it three times. Not because it was sad. Because you made it sound like something worth paying attention to.
I'm back in my own city now. My own, if a city can be yours. I've been in seventeen cities in four months. Ours is starting to feel less like mine.
I don't know what to do with that."
Hazel played it at 2:14 a.m. and sat with it afterward the way she sometimes sat with the notes that arrived already broken open, that required no interpretation because they had interpreted themselves.
She spoke carefully.
"To the caller from Singapore," she said — she had remembered the time zone from the metadata — "welcome home. I think cities can be yours and not-yours at the same time, the way people can. We don't own the things we love. We just keep coming back to them and hoping they'll be in the same place when we do."
She paused. Then: "I'm glad you listened to the old ones."
She was not sure why that felt important to say.
Chapter Three: The Shape of Insomnia
October in Seoul moved like a slow exhale.
The humidity released its grip. The air sharpened. Leaves on the ginkgo trees along the streets of Mapo-gu turned simultaneously yellow and fell simultaneously, coating the pavement in something that looked, at night under the streetlamps, like scattered coins. The Han River grew quieter as the evening joggers grew more bundled, more determined-looking. The convenience stores installed their portable grills outside and the smell of sizzling street food joined the more permanent smells of the city — diesel and autumn leaves and the particular undertone of a city built and rebuilt and layered with decades of itself.
Hazel's apartment was on the fifth floor of a building that had no elevator and this seemed fine to her because she had read once that the Japanese had a concept for the value of inconvenience, and she had adopted it without fully investigating whether the source was accurate. The apartment had a single large window that looked out over the street, and in October, with the window cracked and the radiator muttering under the sill, the room had a warmth that she associated with rightness — a word she had stopped apologizing for using, since it seemed to describe things more precisely than its alternatives.
She had three lectures on Mondays and Wednesdays, two on Thursdays. She was studying linguistics with a focus on Korean language acquisition. She worked twelve hours a week at a café three blocks from campus that was owned by a Korean-Australian couple and played exclusively 1970s American soft rock, which created a specific cognitive dissonance she had come to love. She tutored a high school student in English on Saturday afternoons. She read. She walked. She produced, with devotion and care, a podcast that nobody knew she made.
Her best friend Mira Shin was the sort of person who occupied space with full commitment, which Hazel admired and found slightly exhausting. Mira was doing her MFA in graphic design and had opinions about everything from typeface kerning to the moral obligations of carbohydrates. She was one of those people whose love for you expressed itself as constant attention — she noticed things, pointed them out, made you feel seen in a way that was sometimes wonderful and occasionally felt like being held under an affectionate but somewhat relentless magnifying glass.
They met for brunch on the first Sunday of November at a place in Yeonnam-dong with good eggs and better coffee and the kind of lazy weekend crowd that felt like a reward for having made it through another week.
"You look like you didn't sleep," Mira said.
"I didn't."
"Again."
"Still. It's a continuous condition."
"Hazel."
"Mira."
This particular exchange had recurred approximately four hundred times across three years of friendship, and they both understood it to mean: I love you and I'm concerned and I know and I'm fine and are you sure and yes.
"I was up late," Hazel said, which was true and not the entirety of the truth.
"Doing what?"
"Reading. Listening to the city. Thinking."
"You think too much."
"You've mentioned that."
"It's like a full-time job you do for free," Mira said, wrapping both hands around her coffee. "All that rich interior life and no one to invoice."
Hazel laughed. "I'm practicing."
"For what?"
"For when someone turns up who deserves it."
Mira looked at her over the rim of her mug with an expression that Hazel recognized as the precursor to a Speech About Love. She had received many of these speeches. They were delivered with genuine affection and were not wrong, exactly, but they tended to locate Hazel's approach to romance as the primary obstacle, which she found reductive.
"You know what your problem is?" Mira began.
"I romanticize things," Hazel said.
"You romanticize things. You build entire emotional architecture around hypothetical people and then when actual people appear — with their actual human mediocrity and their specific flaws — they can't compete."
"That's not entirely true."
"The guy from your research seminar."
"He chewed with his mouth open."
"Hazel. That's a human flaw. That's not a disqualification."
"It's not the chewing, it's what the chewing suggested about his fundamental relationship to the world."
Mira put her mug down. "See, that. That. That right there is what I mean. You want to be in love like people are in love in films. You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie."
The phrase landed more accurately than Hazel appreciated. She picked up her coffee.
"That's a little harsh," she said.
"It's not harsh. It's said with complete love. You have this incredibly specific idea of what it's supposed to feel like — this thing that happens somewhere below the ribs and doesn't require explanation — and you're waiting for it in a world made of people who are just doing their best."
"I'm not waiting for anything impossible."
"You're waiting for the feeling, not the person. You've told me yourself that the feeling is the thing."
Hazel considered this.
"The feeling comes from the person," she said finally. "Or it should. I don't think I'm wrong to want it from the right one."
"I'm not saying you're wrong," Mira said. "I'm saying it might arrive in an unexpected package. Or with the mouth open."
"There are limits," Hazel said, "to unexpected packages."
Mira laughed. It was an argument they had been having in various forms for three years, and neither of them had conceded anything, which was perhaps the correct outcome.
What Hazel did not tell Mira — what she had not told anyone — was that she had begun to think about the anonymous caller.
Not in the way you think about someone you know. She knew nothing about him. She had no name, no face, no geography beyond the inferred Singapore and the single detail of a hotel room and a city that felt not-quite-his. She had his voice and his words and the particular quality of his silences, which were not awkward but considered — the silences of someone who was used to thinking before he spoke and had decided, for the duration of these notes, to let the thinking happen in front of her.
She thought about him the way you think about a song you have heard only once, that you cannot fully reconstruct but cannot stop reaching for.
He had sent four notes in four weeks.
They were not confessional in the way many listener notes were — raw and uncontrolled and arriving in the small hours smelling of tears or alcohol or both. His were more like letters. Formal at the edges and honest in the center. He asked questions sometimes that he did not expect answered, or that he answered himself, in the next breath. He mentioned — once, briefly — that he was a public person. He did not elaborate. The word he used was exhausted, and he used it the way someone uses a word for the first time after having suppressed it — with the relief of a thing finally said.
She had played three of his notes on air. She had kept one — too private, too unguarded, too much like finding an open letter — and had sent him a direct message through the podcast's anonymous portal instead:
I received your note. I didn't play it on air — it felt like it belonged to you more than the night. I hope you got some sleep.
He had responded four hours later, which meant it was very early morning wherever he was.
Thank you. I think that's the first time someone has handed something back to me instead of taking it.
She had read that and sat with it for a long time.
Chapter Four: Juhoon's Nights
November found Cortis in Seoul.
They were between legs of a tour — three weeks in which Juhoon was scheduled for individual promotional activities, two group variety show recordings, a photo shoot for a luxury watch brand, a fansign event, and a studio session for new material. This was a light schedule, relative to what had preceded and what would follow. His manager, Park Jiyoung, who had been with him for four years and communicated primarily in calendar invites and the occasional concerned glance, had told him he had evenings free this month.
Evenings free, for Juhoon, had begun to mean: earbuds in, lying on the floor of his apartment in Hannam-dong — he always preferred the floor to the bed when thinking, something about the flatness of it, the way it pressed back — listening to Sleepless in Seoul.
His apartment was a kind of performance in itself. It was beautiful and carefully designed and had been selected by a management company on the basis of several practical criteria, and it contained everything he needed and almost nothing he had chosen. There were plants, which were his — six of them, arranged by a window that faced north and therefore required exactly the kind of low-light species he had researched with a specificity that would have surprised anyone who had not seen him approach a problem he actually cared about. There was a bookshelf of novels. There was recording equipment that lived in the second bedroom, which had become the room where he actually existed, which told you something about him.
He did not think of himself as lonely. He thought of himself as alone, which was different — or should have been, and sometimes wasn't.
He lay on the floor on a Tuesday in November and listened to Episode 46.
Her voice was distinct. He had been thinking about this in the way that people who appreciate audio quality think about voices — technically, with genuine admiration — because there was something in it that functioned like a key in a lock. It was warm without being performed. It had a cadence that moved between thoughtfulness and humor with such ease that the humor felt like a natural weather condition rather than an attempt. She was, he had decided, someone who had spent considerable time listening to things, because she spoke like someone who understood that the silence around words was as important as the words themselves.
He knew nothing about her. He had tried, once, to find the podcast's origin and had arrived at a hosting platform with no personal information attached. He had not tried harder. There was something about the anonymity that felt necessary — a container for honesty that depended on its sealed quality. He had spent six years being known by the wrong parts of himself. The relief of being entirely unknown was so profound it had begun to feel like oxygen.
"Tonight," she said in Episode 46, "I want to talk about insomnia as a spiritual condition."
He smiled at the ceiling.
"I don't mean spiritual in the organized-religion sense, though I'll take it wherever it finds me. I mean it in the sense that 3 a.m. is perhaps the only hour when your brain stops negotiating with you. All the performance stops. All the version of yourself that you carry for other people — the competent one, the together one, the one who has answers — that person goes to sleep, usually, around midnight. And what's left is something more raw. More true, maybe. More afraid."
"Insomnia is a gift, in that sense. Not one you asked for. But it takes you somewhere most people don't go very often."
She paused, and he heard — very faintly — the sound of traffic through an open window, some distant city-breath.
"You are most yourself when you are most tired. Someone told me that once. I've been thinking about it for three years."
He sent her a voice note that same night, at 1 a.m., sitting in his second bedroom with the recording equipment off, just his phone.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 47 — TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]
"The episode about insomnia. I wanted to respond, which I don't usually want to do. I want to respond because you said something that I've been trying to say for about two years, and you said it much better than I could have.
The person who shows up at 3 a.m. — I've been thinking of that person as a failure. As evidence that something hasn't worked, hasn't held. I've been trying to get back to the other version — the one with answers, like you said — and not succeeding, and feeling the failure of that.
What if that's the wrong frame? That's the question I'm sitting with.
What if the 3 a.m. version is just the one who hasn't given up on being honest yet?"
Hazel listened to the note three times before airing it.
She aired it without comment at the end, which was unusual for her — she always responded, always let the notes land in a bed of conversation. But this one she let stand alone, and closed the episode with just the sound of her city in the background, and the quiet.
Her listener numbers were not large. But several people in the comments that week mentioned the final voice note specifically, with the vocabulary of people who had been surprised by something true.
One person wrote: who is that. I need to know who that is.
Hazel sat with that comment for a long time, in the dark, with the city breathing through her window, thinking: so do I, actually. So do I.
PART Ⅱ: PARALLEL FREQUENCIES
Chapter Five: Near Misses, or the Geometry of Almost
A map of Seoul in November would show, if you overlaid the movements of two people, a geometry of almost.
It would show Hazel walking from her apartment in Mangwon to the café on Wednesday mornings, earbuds in, hands in the pockets of her good coat, passing the ginkgo trees that had dropped their coins on the ground and were now bare-armed against the pale sky.
It would show Juhoon, on the same Wednesday, leaving the Cortis practice building three blocks north of that same street, head down, cap pulled low, moving to a van that waited at the corner.
It would show them at the same convenience store — the one on the corner with the handwritten sign in the window that said 참깨라면 입고 ("sesame ramen back in stock") in marker that had faded to the color of old blood — Juhoon at 11:45 p.m. on a Thursday, Hazel at 12:30 a.m. on the same Friday morning, after recording Episode 48.
It would show them at a coffee shop in Hongdae that they both frequented: Juhoon with a manager and a hat, Hazel with a linguistics paper and a highlighter, on different days in the same week in November, sitting in the same corner seat by the window because that seat had the best light and both of them knew it.
It would show parallel trajectories in a city of ten million people that kept bending toward each other without touching.
This was not fate, exactly. This was Seoul — layered and dense and full of coincidences that only became legible in retrospect, when you were trying to reconstruct the story of how two people's lives had arranged themselves into an inevitability. At the time, neither of them knew the other's face. They knew only: voice. Word. The specific quality of night silence on a podcast. The sound of a city breathing through two separate open windows.
Mira had a theory, which she shared over tteokbokki on a Friday evening in November.
"You are emotionally attached to a stranger," she said.
"I'm not attached," Hazel said. "I'm interested. There's a distinction."
"You brought him up in three separate conversations this week."
"I bring things up when they're interesting."
"You said he was perceptive. You described the quality of his silences." Mira pointed with her fork. "You described. The quality. Of a stranger's. Silences."
"He's a podcast listener who sends thoughtful notes."
"He's a man whose voice you have developed feelings about."
"I have appreciation. Not feelings."
"Those are the same thing and you know it." Mira leaned back. "You know what this is? This is just two neuroses knowing they are a perfect match. You are a person who falls in love through words and voices and cannot sleep, and he is apparently also a person who cannot sleep and speaks carefully and sends voice notes to anonymous podcasts at 1 a.m. You are two broken clocks that happen to ring at the same time."
"That's not romantic," Hazel said.
"I didn't say it was romantic. I said it made sense."
"They're the same thing."
Mira looked at her with the expression of someone watching a person walk directly into a glass door with great intentionality. "At least admit you're interested."
A pause. A piece of tteok, chewed. The sound of the restaurant around them, loud and warm and smelling of chili and sesame and the specific comfort of a Friday night.
"I'm interested," Hazel said.
"Progress," Mira said.
What she did not say — what she would not have known how to say, even to Mira, even to the air — was that the interest had begun to feel like more than curiosity. It was the kind of interest that colonized small moments: a Tuesday evening when she was editing audio and heard his voice again in playback and had to stop for a moment and just listen. A Thursday morning when she woke and found a new note in the podcast inbox and lay still before opening it, feeling something that lived adjacent to anticipation — that pleasurable dread of something you want very much and are afraid of in proportion to how much you want it.
She had begun to think of him as someone she knew. Which was insane. She knew nothing. No name. No face. No age, with certainty. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, based on voice and affect — a voice that had lived in it long enough to know its own register, that wasn't performing anything except occasionally, when it grew careful, a kind of self-consciousness.
She had begun to think of him as someone she was going to recognize when she met him.
This was, she acknowledged to herself in the 3 a.m. clarity she had described on air, possibly insane.
It was also possibly the most honest thing she had felt in two years.
Chapter Six: What Juhoon Was Not Saying
He had begun to wait for Tuesdays and Fridays in a way that reorganized his sense of the week.
This was not something he had planned or particularly welcomed. He was a person who had spent six years trying to limit his dependencies — not from coldness but from the particular knowledge that came from learning, repeatedly, that the things you leaned on in this industry had a habit of shifting or withdrawing or turning out to be contractual rather than real. He was not cynical about this. He had simply become careful.
And yet he was waiting for a podcast.
He had not told anyone. Not the other members, not his manager. It was not the sort of thing that required concealing — there was nothing shameful or dangerous about it — but telling someone would have made it legible, and he was not sure he wanted it legible. He wanted to keep it where it was: private, warm, entirely his.
In mid-November, Cortis recorded an episode of a variety show that required the members to answer questions about their current obsessions. The format was designed to produce revelations: rapid-fire, performed spontaneity, the warm chaos that made good television.
Martin had said: "I'm genuinely obsessed with this one tteokbokki place in Mapo. I went four times in one week. The owner recognized me on the third visit and said nothing, which I respected deeply."
James had said: "Old American road movies. The ones where nothing happens for forty-five minutes and then everything happens at once." He had delivered this with the slightly sideways smile of someone who understood exactly how that sounded and was comfortable with it.
Seonghyeon had said: "I've been learning to make bread. Not well. The bread is a problem. But I think there's a metaphor in the bread somewhere and I'm not ready to give up on it." This had produced thirty seconds of the other members laughing in a way that was entirely genuine, and which would be the clip most replayed from the episode.
Juhoon had said: "classical music" and "a plant care forum I found." Both true. Both safe.
He thought of the podcast and did not say it.
He sent a voice note that Tuesday:
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 49 — TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]
"There's a specific version of loneliness that I think is particular to being surrounded. I want to talk about it but I'm not sure you can talk about it without it sounding like a complaint, and I don't want it to sound like a complaint, because I know how lucky I am. I say that not to preface a complaint but because it's actually true. I know how lucky I am.
But there's a version of loneliness that isn't about being alone. It's about — you're in the room and you're present and you perform presence very well, you've been doing it for a long time — but something in you is watching from the other side of the glass. You're watching yourself perform the being-there and you can't find your way back in.
I don't know if that's loneliness or something else. I don't know what to call it.
But I wanted to name it somewhere. Even if I couldn't name it properly."
Hazel sat with this one for a long time.
She played it toward the end of Episode 49, and when it ended she did not respond immediately. She let the city fill the silence. A distant motorbike. A few drops of rain against the window. The radiator's underbreath.
"That's not a complaint," she said finally. "That's a map. You just drew a map of something most people can't find words for."
She paused.
"I've felt it too. That being-on-the-other-side-of-the-glass thing. I think it's not loneliness exactly. I think it's the cost of performing yourself so reliably that you forget there's a self underneath the performance. And then 3 a.m. comes, or a stranger's podcast comes, and the performance falls away, and you remember you're still there."
Another pause, longer.
"You're still there," she said. "I just want to say that. Whatever you haven't been able to name — it's still there."
Juhoon listened to this on a Wednesday morning, in the van, on the way to a press junket, and did not trust what his face was doing for a full thirty seconds.
Keonho, seated beside him, glanced over.
"You good bro?" he said.
"Fine," Juhoon said. "Something in the podcast I'm listening to."
Keonho waited. He was good at waiting.
"It just — said something accurate," Juhoon said. "About something I hadn't managed to say myself."
Keonho nodded slowly, with the particular acknowledgment of someone who has known you long enough to understand that you do not need the response to be verbal.
"What podcast?" he said.
"Nothing you'd know," Juhoon said. "Small."
Keonho turned back to his own window. The van moved through Seoul in the grey morning light.
"Those are the good ones," he said.
That same evening, Cortis had a free night, which was rare enough that it functioned as an event.
They ended up at Keonho's apartment — the largest of the members' individual spaces, with a kitchen big enough for five people to occupy without anyone having to stand in the hallway — because Keonho had announced at 7 p.m. that he was making jjigae and anyone who arrived before eight would be fed and anyone who arrived after eight would have to explain themselves.
Everyone arrived before eight.
Martin arrived first, which was characteristic: he was constitutionally early and had spent six years pretending this was coincidence. He came in already wearing the particular expression of someone who wanted to be useful and was calibrating how to offer it, which was also characteristic, and set about chopping garlic with the focused pleasure of someone who had found a task at exactly the right moment.
James arrived second, with two bags of convenience store snacks arranged by what he described as "emotional logic" — the sweet things first, the salty things after, something fizzy at the end — and was immediately interrogated about the system by Seonghyeon, who arrived thirty seconds later having apparently been waiting outside the building for James so they could enter together, which neither of them acknowledged.
Juhoon arrived last and was greeted by the specific comfortable noise of four people who had been in each other's company for six years: overlapping conversations, someone's music from a phone, the sound of a spoon against a pot.
He sat on the floor by the low table — his preferred position, always the floor — and accepted a beer from Martin and felt something release in his chest the way it only released in rooms that did not require anything of him.
"You look like you're thinking," Seonghyeon said, dropping down beside him with the sudden gravity of a person who has decided the floor was the correct choice all along. He was eating something that crinkled.
"I'm not," Juhoon said.
"You have the face."
"What face."
"The one where you're working something out but you don't want to be asked about it." Seonghyeon considered this. "It's very identifiable. The fans have a name for it."
"The fans have a name for everything."
"They do," Seonghyeon agreed cheerfully. "It's a whole system. Very organized. Slightly frightening."
From the kitchen, Keonho said something that made Martin laugh loudly enough that James looked up from his phone with the expression of someone who had missed a joke and was deciding whether to ask. He did not ask. He put his phone away and came to sit at the table instead, and the five of them arranged themselves in the loose geometry of people who had long ago stopped being deliberate about where they sat in relation to each other, because the proximity had become its own language.
Juhoon ate. He listened. He let the room be a room.
Later, when the jjigae was finished and the conversation had moved through the schedule and an argument about whether a recent music video director's creative choices had been interesting or pretentious (James: interesting. Martin: both. Seonghyeon: pretentious is the new interesting. Keonho: quiet, smiling, refilling everyone's bowls), Keonho sat down beside Juhoon against the wall and the room reconfigured around them into two conversations — Seonghyeon and James falling into something about a game, Keonho drifting to the kitchen with the dishes.
"You sleeping?" Martin said.
"Getting there," Juhoon said, which was true in the literal sense of getting there, as in: closer than before, as in: something had been helping.
Martin looked at him for a moment. He had a way of asking the second question without asking it — of letting the silence run past the easy answer and wait for the real one.
Juhoon looked at his beer.
"I found something," he said finally. "That helps. With the nights."
Martin waited.
"Just — a thing I listen to. Someone talking about the city." He paused. "It sounds small."
"Small things," Martin said, "are usually the actual things."
Juhoon looked at him.
"You say things like that and then everyone wonders why you're the leader," he said.
Martin smiled, the small real one that didn't make it to stages. "Go to sleep at a reasonable hour for once in your life, Juhoon."
"I'll try," Juhoon said.
He did not, entirely. But he tried, which was more than he had been doing.
Chapter Seven: December
December arrived with the earnestness of a season that knew its own significance.
Seoul in December decorated itself with the kind of commitment that suggested the city had opinions about joy and was going to express them regardless. The streetlamps grew halos. The department stores on Myeongdong put up lights that could, from a distance, be mistaken for the grid of a small city that existed only at night. The Han River park installed warming tents where people sat and drank coffee and looked at the illuminated bridges and felt, for a few hours at a time, that the world was manageable.
Hazel loved December in Seoul with the specific love of someone for whom Christmas had always been more about the idea of the season than the execution of it — the philosophical proposition of warmth, the aesthetic of candlelight and cold air, the old cultural memory of the concept of home gathering itself around you even when you were technically a foreign student in an apartment with a radiator that expressed its mood through sound.
She was, in December, also developing a problem.
The problem was that she had begun to find herself narrating the city to the anonymous caller. Not out loud — not in messages, she was careful about that — but internally, as she moved through it. Standing on the Mapo Bridge watching the evening lights multiply on the water, she thought: he might like this. He said the river made him think of time passing differently. Walking through the Christmas market in City Hall Plaza, smelling cinnamon and roasted chestnuts, she thought: he mentioned once that cold weather in cities felt cleaner than cold weather outside of cities. He's right. This is clean cold.
She had not even realized she was doing it until one Thursday morning she had woken up and thought: I wonder if he uploaded anything new and then corrected herself, because he did not upload, she did, and he sent notes, and the distinction was important because it maintained the appropriate structure of their — not relationship. Their correspondence. Their exchange.
She was catastrophically interested in a stranger.
She held this information in both hands, examined it, put it away.
Then she took it back out.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 52 — FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3 [HOST, HAZEL]
"It's raining in Seoul tonight. I know that's not news — it rains here more than people imagine, and it does something beautiful to the city at night, the way the lights double in the puddles, the way sound travels differently. Tonight I walked home from the river and it was raining lightly, the kind of rain that doesn't require an umbrella so much as a philosophical adjustment.
I've been thinking about proximity lately. About the way you can be close to something — geographically, emotionally — and still not be touching it. There's a word in Korean, 그리움 — geurium — which doesn't translate cleanly but gestures toward a longing for something absent. A missing that's also a kind of love. You don't miss something you didn't love. The missing is evidence of the love.
I think about that word sometimes at 3 a.m. when the city is very quiet and very present and still very far away at its edges.
I think about it when I wonder about people I don't know and won't meet. Whether the missing is its own form of connection.
I don't have an answer. It's just the question I brought with me tonight, and I thought you might want to keep me company with it."
He sent a note on the same Friday:
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 53 — TUESDAY, DECEMBER 7
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS, PLAYED WITH PERMISSION]
"I heard the episode about geurium. I know that word. I've known it for a long time without knowing it was a word, which is its own kind of strange comfort — learning that the language already has a container for the thing you've been carrying around formless.
I want to tell you something. I'm not sure I'm going to, but I'm going to get close.
When I listen to this podcast, I feel like I'm in a room I recognize. Not a room I've been in before. A room that feels like mine, or what mine could feel like, if I had built it myself. Does that make sense?
I spend most of my time in rooms other people built. Beautiful rooms. I'm not complaining about the rooms. But they weren't mine.
This is the only place I've found in a while that felt like I could breathe differently in it.
I don't know how to thank you for that without making it strange.
So I'll just say: thank you. And I'll be here Tuesday."
Hazel listened to this note four times before Episode 53 and then spent twenty minutes sitting in her apartment with the lights off, in the specific way of someone who has received something that requires processing time, who is afraid of being moved but is moved anyway.
She played it near the end of Episode 53. She did not speak after it. She played the sound of the city instead — three minutes of rain and traffic and Seoul at night — and let it end there.
In the comment section, which she read on Saturday mornings with a cup of tea like someone reading the newspaper of the previous week's emotional weather, someone wrote: if that man is listening, the room is yours too.
She almost responded. She did not.
She thought: I know.
Chapter Eight: January — The Distance Between Frequencies
January brought Cortis to Europe.
Twelve days. Germany, France, the Netherlands. The particular cold of a European winter that operated differently from Seoul's — drier, less personal, the light failing by four in the afternoon in a way that felt almost apologetic.
Juhoon sent voice notes from Hamburg, from Paris, from Amsterdam. He did not note the cities, but she could hear the difference — the ambient sounds, the specific acoustic quality of old architecture, something in the background hum that read as elsewhere to her trained ear.
She played them all. She was, by now, responding to him directly in her hosting sections — not by name, not with attribution, but in ways she suspected he recognized, because he responded to those responses in his next notes, and the conversation had developed a recursive quality, a back-and-forth built from episodes and voice notes like a correspondence conducted across weeks and mediated by a quiet hour and a small audience of insomniacs.
In Hamburg, after the second night's show, James found him on the roof terrace of the hotel — an impractical roof terrace for January, but both of them had been spending enough years in climate-controlled interiors that cold outdoor air had acquired a value beyond temperature.
James handed him a bottle of water without preamble and leaned on the railing beside him.
They looked at the city for a while.
"You were different tonight," James said eventually.
Juhoon glanced at him.
"Different how."
"Present." James said it without inflection, matter-of-fact, the way he said things that he had thought through already and didn't need to dramatize. "Like you were actually in the set and not — the other thing."
Juhoon was quiet for a moment.
"The other thing," he said.
"The thing you do sometimes where you're there but you're also clearly somewhere else. The fans call it your concept. It's not your concept." James looked at him. "So whatever it is — good. Keep it."
He did not ask what had changed. This was the thing about James: he had very good instincts about what questions were his to ask and which ones belonged to you, and he moved between those categories with a precision that Juhoon had come to rely on without ever saying so.
"It's nothing big," Juhoon said.
"Okay," James said.
"I've been listening to something. That helps."
"Good," James said again. He straightened up, finished his water. "Amsterdam tomorrow. Try to sleep before three."
He went back inside. The city spread below in its winter darkness, and Juhoon stood in the cold for another ten minutes thinking about a voice in Seoul and a window that was probably open even now, talking to the night.
In Paris, Seonghyeon knocked on his hotel room door at 11:30 p.m. and asked if he wanted to walk somewhere. This was how Seonghyeon processed new cities — by moving through them at night when the performance layer had been removed and the city was just a city.
They walked for forty minutes and Seonghyeon talked about the album they were supposed to start recording in March and the specific feeling of having an idea for a bridge section that he couldn't yet describe to anyone because it existed in his head as a texture rather than a sequence of notes. Juhoon listened and contributed occasionally, and Seonghyeon paused once outside a lit patisserie and took a photo of it and said: "Do you think anyone is happy in there right now?"
"It's closed," Juhoon said.
"The light is on."
"Bakeries prep overnight."
Seonghyeon considered this with genuine satisfaction. "So somewhere right now someone is making something. In the dark. For other people to find in the morning."
Juhoon thought, unexpectedly, about a podcast uploaded at 2 a.m. He did not say this.
"Yes," he said. "Exactly that."
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 56 — TUESDAY, JANUARY 11
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]
"I'm in Paris. I know that sounds like a sentence that should come with a different tone — a lighter one, I mean, the Paris-is-Paris tone. I don't have that tone right now. I have the other one, which is: I'm in Paris and I missed the entire city except through a car window, and it's midnight, and I'm in a hotel room, and I'm tired in a way that I can't sleep off anymore because it's not in my body. It's somewhere else.
I heard your episode about geurium. I wanted to say that I have been missing you lately.
Not you — not you specifically, I don't mean — I mean the frequency you're at. The room you described. I go back to Seoul and I think: the podcast is there. She's there. Somewhere in the city is that voice, and the open window, and the rain.
I think I might be homesick for a place I've never been."
Hazel paused the audio file.
She pressed her hand flat against her sternum, where something was pushing against the inside of her ribcage with a pressure that wasn't quite pain.
He had said her.
He had caught himself and corrected to the frequency and the room but the word had come first, undirected and true: you.
She pressed record.
"To the caller who's been to seventeen cities," she said, and then stopped, because she had just identified him aloud, had given him a name — even an unnamed name — on air for the first time, and that felt significant, felt like a door opened between two hallways, and she needed a moment.
She pressed on.
"You said homesick for a place you've never been. I wrote that down. I might need to give it back to you sometime, because I think it's the most accurate thing anyone has sent me in fifty-six episodes."
A breath.
"The room is there. The frequency is here. Come home when you can."
She did not understand, hearing herself say it back in editing, why come home had felt so natural. She deleted it twice and reinstated it twice, and then left it, because it was true, and editing out true things for comfort was exactly the habit she was trying to break.
Chapter Nine: February — Falling, Which Is Not the Same as Landing
February was when Hazel admitted it to herself.
Not to Mira. Not on air. Just to herself, on a Wednesday morning in her apartment, standing at the window with her tea, watching the street below where a man was trying to fold a broken umbrella against a stubborn wind, looking at the specific shade of winter sky that had no color really but managed to be beautiful anyway.
She was in love with a stranger's voice.
She was not going to do anything about this, obviously. You could not do anything about this. The entire construct of Sleepless in Seoul depended on its anonymity — for him, for her, for the listeners who sent things at 2 a.m. that required the dark to say. The moment she reached through the format for him specifically, the magic collapsed. More than that: it would be a violation. He had come to the podcast because it was safe, because nobody was looking, because the room could hold him without requiring him to be held.
She was not going to do anything about this.
She was just going to know it. Quietly, in the way you know things that you can't change — with the specific accommodation of the true insomniac, who understands that not everything requires resolution, that some things you simply carry through the dark hours and watch them change shape under different lights.
She turned from the window and put the cup in the sink and went to her desk and opened her laptop and began planning Episode 59 with more than usual care, because the care was what she could give him, and she was going to give it.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 59 — FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18 [HOST]
"I've been thinking about what it means to know someone.
I mean this in the smallest, most specific sense: not the legal sense, not the biographical sense, but the — interior sense. To know someone's interior weather. The specific way they think around a problem rather than through it. The way they laugh when something surprises them versus when something delights them. The rhythm of their silences.
We talk about knowing people in terms of facts. We know their histories and their allergies and their preferences. But I think there's another kind of knowing that lives somewhere else — somewhere below facts, in the register of presence. You've either been in the room with someone's actual self or you haven't. Most of us are in the room with the version people bring to rooms.
I think the voice is different. The voice, in the dark, at an hour when the performance has stopped — I think the voice is closer to the actual self than most things we're given access to.
I know things about some of you that I couldn't name. Can't put in a sentence. But I know them. In here."
She pressed her hand to her sternum.
"That's enough. That's more than most people get."
He sent a note that same Friday, which was unusual — his notes typically came between episodes, not on the day of one.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 60 — TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]
"I heard tonight's episode and I'm not sleeping anyway so I thought I'd send this now.
You said the voice in the dark is closer to the actual self. I've been thinking about that for three hours. I've been thinking about the last time I felt like my actual self in a room. Not the version I carried in. Not the version required.
I think — I'm almost sure — that this is it. These notes. Tuesday and Friday.
I don't say that because I want to make it strange. I say it because you said honesty was the reason for the hour, and I'm trying to practice. The actual-self practice. It's harder than it sounds.
I'm working up to something. I'm not there yet. I want you to know that I am, though. Working up to it.
Also: it snowed last night in Seoul. I stood on my balcony for a long time. I thought about something you said three episodes ago about how cities look honest in the snow, how they can't hide their shapes. I think I've been hiding my shape for a while. I'm trying to stop."
She did not play this note on air.
She sat with it in her inbox for three days, and then sent a message through the portal:
The snow is still on the rooftops on my street. The city looks exactly like you said — honest. Like it got tired of the performance too.
I'm glad you're here. Tuesday and Friday. I'm glad it's you.
His response came at 11:47 p.m.:
I'm glad it's you too.
PART Ⅲ: THE WEIGHT OF BEING KNOWN
Chapter Ten: March — What the Fans Noticed
Fame had its own ecosystem, and within that ecosystem there were people — a specific subset, dedicated and observant and possessed of a collective intelligence that operated like a distributed computer — who noticed things.
The fan community that had gathered around Cortis over six years was vast and internally differentiated, with its own hierarchies and dialects. There were casual listeners, there were dedicated followers, there were the people who attended every available fan event and the people who tracked schedules and the people who ran analysis accounts and the people who maintained collaborative wikis of increasingly granular detail.
And there were, in March, several of these people who began to notice something about Juhoon.
It was not one thing. It was a collection of things, and the collection was only visible to people who paid very close attention to the pattern of things rather than the things themselves. It was the fact that since approximately October, Juhoon had developed a habit of using the word frequency in interviews when asked about his emotional state — not often, but repeatedly enough that someone catalogued it. It was the fact that he had said, on a music show in January, when asked what he listened to when he couldn't sleep, that he listened to "a podcast" with an expression that was unusual for him — not guarded, not performed, but private in the way of someone protecting something soft. It was the fact that his most recent lyrics, which he had written for the new Cortis album, contained images of open windows and cities at night and a specific phrase — the room I recognize — that a dedicated enough reader would have recognized as a paraphrase of something that appeared, if you knew where to look, in an obscure episode of a small anonymous podcast called Sleepless in Seoul.
The fan who made this connection was a twenty-year-old in Daegu named Kim Soojin, who ran an analysis account with eight thousand followers and had the methodical patience of someone who genuinely found the puzzle interesting for its own sake.
She posted her analysis on a Thursday in March with appropriate caveats — this is speculative, this might be nothing, I am not trying to start anything — and the analysis was, methodologically, excellent. It laid out the pattern clearly without conclusions she hadn't earned.
The post received twenty-three thousand likes in four hours.
The comment most frequently made was a variation of: who is the podcast person.
Hazel was entirely unaware of this.
She had eighty-eight thousand listeners as of March, which was still small in the landscape of podcasts but had been growing steadily, and she still had not told anyone who she was. She had received press inquiries twice, from small music blogs who had written about the podcast's unique format, and had declined both times. She was, in some ways, well-positioned to be found — a foreign national in Seoul, an English-speaking podcast about the city, a distinctive voice — but she had structured the anonymity carefully, and the fans who arrived at Sleepless in Seoul through the analysis post found: a voice, episodes, and an inbox.
They sent thousands of messages in three days.
Most of them were kind. A few were not. Most asked versions of the same question — is JH from Cortis the anonymous caller — with varying degrees of tact. One sent a ten-paragraph analysis of voice note acoustic patterns that was genuinely impressive and reached the correct conclusion.
Hazel read all of them on a Saturday morning with her tea going cold, and by the time she reached the end of the inbox, the tea was room temperature and something in her chest was very loud and confused and frightened.
She knew the name. Everyone in Seoul knew the name. Cortis had released their latest album six weeks ago and it had been on every playlist and every café speaker and every subway advertisement for a month and a half, and Hazel had listened to it — she had listened to it three times, actually, because she had good taste in music and the album was genuinely exceptional — and she had not — had not once — connected—
She opened the fan analysis post on her phone.
She read it very carefully.
She read it again.
She turned her phone face-down on the table.
She sat for a very long time in the specific silence of someone who has just been handed information that reorganizes everything and is not yet sure in which direction.
Chapter Eleven: What She Knew and What She Didn't
She did not tell him.
This was important. This was the decision she made within the first hour, sitting at her table with the overcast March light coming through the window. She did not reach into the inbox and say: I know who you are now. She did not send anything. She sat with the information and let it settle and tried to understand what it meant to her.
What it meant, initially, was terror.
Not because he was famous — or not only because of that, though the fame was large enough to require some processing on its own. But because the analysis post had made something visible that she had been keeping carefully unexamined: she had feelings. Real ones. Not the interesting-intellectual-aesthetic feelings she had been willing to admit to. The kind that rearranged your priorities and made you think about a person at 3 a.m. in the way you thought about something whose absence would actually cost you something.
She had those feelings about a person she had never met, whose voice she knew and whose face now appeared on her phone screen if she looked him up, which she had, once, briefly, before putting the phone down again.
He was exactly what you would expect. Which was not the point. The point was that the voice she knew was the voice of someone who existed in the world in a way that was vast and surveilled and managed, and she was an anonymous podcast host in a fifth-floor apartment in Mangwon, and the distance between those two lives was not merely geographic.
She thought about what Mira had said, months ago: you don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.
She thought about the specific way his voice had said I think I might be homesick for a place I've never been.
She thought about her own voice saying come home when you can and the word she had deleted twice and reinstated twice.
She thought: this is what it is. You fell in love with a voice in the dark, and the voice turned out to belong to someone, and someone turned out to be real, and now you have to figure out what to do with that.
She pressed record.
She did not tell him what she knew. She recorded Episode 61 as she always did — the city, the hour, the state of things — and she played two listener notes that were not his, and she spoke for seventeen minutes and recorded three minutes of Seoul breathing at the end.
She uploaded it at 2 a.m. on Tuesday.
She lay down afterward and stared at the ceiling with her heart beating strangely.
He sent a note three hours later.
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS, NOT AIRED]
"I heard tonight's episode. You sounded different.
Not bad different. Just — like something had shifted. Like you were speaking from slightly further back.
I notice things like this. I've been listening long enough now that I know your voice the way you know someone's footstep pattern. I know when you're tired and when you're uncertain. Tonight you were uncertain.
I hope you're okay. I hope whatever is making you uncertain is the kind that resolves rather than the kind that stays.
I'm in Seoul. I've been here for three weeks now, which feels like a long time by my standards. I've been thinking about — I've been thinking about a lot of things. About what it would mean to —
I'm not going to finish that sentence yet.
But soon."
She read this in bed at 5 a.m. and thought: I know.
She wrote back:
I'm fine. Still here. You don't have to finish the sentence yet.
She pressed send and put her phone face-down and made herself sleep.
Chapter Twelve: Mira Figures It Out
The thing about Mira was that she was relentlessly perceptive, and this was both her greatest quality and the thing that made her difficult to hide things from.
She showed up at Hazel's apartment on a Wednesday evening in March with groceries and the specific energy of someone who had been assembling evidence all week and had now arrived to present it. Hazel let her in without particular apprehension, because she had been telling herself she was fine.
She was not fine.
"Sit down," Mira said, depositing groceries on the counter and taking off her coat with the purposefulness of someone who had not come to cook but was using the groceries as context.
"I live here," Hazel said.
"Sit."
Hazel sat.
Mira pulled out her phone and laid it on the table between them, screen up. The fan analysis post was on the screen.
Hazel looked at it for a moment.
"How did you find that," she said.
"Because I follow eight Cortis fan accounts, as anyone with good taste in music does, and this has been everywhere this week." Mira sat down across from her. "And because I remembered you said the podcast listener spoke with a deep tired voice and was on tour a lot and was probably a public figure and said I'm surrounded by people and I'm completely alone."
A silence.
"And?" Hazel said.
"And," Mira said, "his voice on the recent album documentary is — Hazel, his voice is—"
"I know," Hazel said.
The silence that followed was the kind that Mira had learned, over three years, to give space to.
"How long have you known?" she said finally.
"A week."
"And?"
"And I'm processing it."
"That's a word," Mira said. "Let's try different words."
Hazel looked at the table. Outside, the rain that had been threatening all day finally arrived, a sound against the window that she had been using as emotional texture for eighteen months and was now simply grateful for because it gave her somewhere else to direct her attention.
"I think I'm in love with a voice," she said. "And the voice has a face, and the face is—" She gestured helplessly.
"Famous," Mira said.
"That's the smallest part of it."
"What's the largest part?"
"The largest part is that I don't know how to—" She pressed her hands flat on the table. "When I didn't know who he was, it was clean. It was just — two people in the dark, being honest with each other. I didn't have to think about what it meant or whether it was possible or whether he was performing some private version of himself for an anonymous podcast the way people perform everything else."
"Do you think he was?"
Hazel was quiet for a moment.
"No," she said. "I don't think he was. That's the thing. That's why I'm — that's the problem. I don't think it was performed. I think he came to the podcast because it was the one place nothing was required of him."
Mira looked at her friend with the particular gentleness she kept under all the opinions.
"So what are you afraid of?" she said.
"That it was never about me," Hazel said. "That it was about the anonymous room. That I was just the container for something he needed to put somewhere."
"And if that's not true?"
"Then I'm afraid of it being true in a different direction — that it was me, specifically, and that when he finds out who specifically I am, I won't be—" She paused. "He lives in a world I can't imagine. People follow him. People study him. People have feelings about him that go on for paragraphs. I am a person in a small apartment in Mangwon who runs a podcast that eighty-eight thousand people listen to, which is a lot but is nothing compared to—"
"Stop," Mira said.
Hazel stopped.
"You are not nothing compared to," Mira said. "You are a specific person who a specific person sends voice notes to at 1 a.m. in hotels in European cities. You are the room he described. You are the frequency. He said that — you told me he said that."
"Mira—"
"He said it. Not to JH-the-idol's hypothetical future girlfriend. To you. To your voice. To the you that talks about the city at 3 a.m. and says geurium correctly and lets the silence mean things."
Hazel blinked. Something was happening behind her eyes that she was going to prevent from becoming tears, because she was a person who cried rarely and in private.
"He doesn't know it's me," she said.
"He knows more about you than most people who have had coffee with you," Mira said.
This, Hazel thought, was possibly true. It was also not an answer to the problem. It was, if anything, the description of the problem from a new angle.
"I don't know what to do," she said.
Mira reached across the table and put her hand over Hazel's.
"I know," she said. "But here's the thing. You don't have to do anything yet. He's still sending notes, isn't he?"
"Yes."
"So keep going. Keep being the room. And trust that something is going to happen that makes the next thing clear."
Hazel looked at her friend.
"That is completely uncharacteristically soft of you," she said.
"I have depth," Mira said. "It's a whole thing."
Chapter Thirteen: The Album
The new Cortis album was called Seventeen Cities.
Juhoon had written three of the twelve tracks on his own, which was unusual — he had always contributed to the group's songwriting but not in this quantity, not with this specificity. The album's B-side had a song called The Open Window that was quieter than anything he had released before, almost uncomfortably personal, and the music press had noticed this and commented with varying degrees of insight. One review had called it "a departure into interior territory." Another had called it "JH's love letter to insomnia." A third, more perceptive, had noted that it sounded like "the documentation of something that happened rather than the invention of something desired."
Juhoon had read that review in the back of a van and thought: yes. That's exactly right.
The lyrics contained a line that his co-writers had questioned — not critically, but with the curiosity of people who wanted to understand the reference — which went:
I heard your voice and it was coming home to a place I'd never been but always known
He had kept it because there was no version of it that felt less true, and the alternative was writing something that sounded like a love song but wasn't, and he had enough of those.
He had been thinking, all of March, about the unfinished sentence.
He had said: I've been thinking about what it would mean to—
And stopped himself.
What he had been thinking about, and what he had not sent into the voice note, was this: what it would mean to reach through the podcast's anonymous format and say something direct. To ask — carefully, with appropriate respect for the container they had built — whether there was a way to be in the same room that wasn't mediated by audio files and inboxes.
He had been thinking about this since February.
He had not done it yet because he was not sure of the grammar. Because there was something that worked only in this specific dark-and-anonymous space, and to dismantle it in pursuit of a more conventional kind of proximity seemed like a risk that required certainty he didn't have. He was afraid that knowing would not improve on not-knowing. He was afraid that the version of themselves they had built in the dark, without faces, without the weight of the world either of them moved through — that version was fragile, and he had never held anything fragile well.
He was also, and this was the true thing underneath all the others, afraid that he was wrong. That the feeling was one-directional. That she was a podcast host who treated all her dedicated listeners with this specific warmth and that he had misread the warmth as directed.
He had listened, more than once, to the episode where she said: I know things about some of you that I couldn't name. He had turned the phrase in his hands. He had wondered if he was in the some of you or if he was flattering himself.
On a Tuesday in late March, after listening to Episode 63 and sitting for twenty minutes on the floor of his apartment — his good floor, the flat honest floor — he sent a note that was the closest he had come to finishing the sentence.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 64 — TUESDAY, MARCH 29
[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]
"I want to tell you something, and I want to tell it carefully, because the space we've built — the Tuesday-and-Friday space — is the most honest one I've had in years, and I don't want to damage it by asking it to hold more than it was designed for.
But I think I have to. I think I have to try.
I've been listening to your voice for six months. I've been sending you things I don't send anywhere else. And the person who sends those things — the one at 3 a.m. on hotel floors and apartment floors and in cities I couldn't locate on a map afterward — that person feels more like me than the one I carry around the rest of the time.
I don't know you. I know your voice and the way your mind moves and the city you live in and that you're awake at 2 a.m. and that you love rain and that you said geurium once in a way that I've been carrying with me ever since.
I think that's knowing.
I think I want to find out if I'm right.
I don't know how to ask this appropriately inside the format we have. So I'm going to ask it here, and if it's wrong, you can keep this note out of the episode and I'll understand: is there a way to be in the same city without the microphone between us?"
She listened to this voice note alone, at 1:30 in the morning, on a Tuesday, the city audible through her window.
She listened to it twice.
She pressed both hands against her face for a moment, covering her eyes, taking a breath.
Then she opened the portal, and wrote:
I think there's a way. But I need to tell you something first. Can we talk in here — in writing, just the two of us, before we talk in the same city? There's something I know that I should have told you sooner, and I want to tell you before it tells itself.
He responded twenty-three minutes later:
Yes. Tell me.
PART Ⅳ: THE COST OF BEING SEEN
Chapter Fourteen: What She Told Him
She wrote it carefully.
She had drafted it three times in a document before she sent it through the portal, and the three drafts showed the stages of how you tell someone something true: the first draft was too apologetic; the second was too clinical; the third, which she sent, was simply what had happened.
[PORTAL MESSAGE — HOST TO ANONYMOUS LISTENER — MARCH 29, 2:14 A.M.]
I've known for three weeks. A fan community made a connection between your voice notes and some things you've said in other contexts — I won't explain the chain of reasoning, but it was thorough and I believe it. I didn't come looking. It came to me. And then I went still for a while because I didn't know what it meant and I didn't know how to say it and every time I thought about opening this window I—
I want to be honest about why I didn't tell you immediately: I was afraid. Not of who you are. Of what it might do to the thing we built here if the weight of who you are walked into the room. This space has worked because neither of us has had to carry the rest of ourselves into it. And I didn't want to be the one to end that.
I still don't know if this is the end or the beginning of something.
I know that I should have told you when I found out. I know that sitting with it for three weeks while you sent me notes was not entirely honest, even though I wasn't performing anything — everything I have said to you has been true, is true, will continue to be true.
I'm sorry I waited.
Tell me what you need.
She pressed send. She sat. She put the kettle on, because she was a person who dealt with large emotional moments by making tea, which was not the most sophisticated coping mechanism but was thermally reliable.
She was on her second cup when the response came.
[PORTAL MESSAGE — ANONYMOUS LISTENER — MARCH 29, 3:07 A.M.]
How long have you known.
I know you said three weeks. I mean — which version of what I said. Which notes. How much.
She understood the question. She typed:
All of it. I've kept it from air when you asked. Everything else I've heard.
A longer pause this time.
[PORTAL MESSAGE — 3:24 A.M.]
I need a few days. Not because I'm angry. Because I need to think. Is that okay.
Yes, she wrote.
The room is here. I'll be here.
Three days became five.
She recorded Episode 64 on Tuesday as scheduled, because the podcast was not contingent on him, had never been contingent on him, and the eighty-eight thousand people who listened deserved her full presence regardless of the specific state of her own heart. She talked about March and the way seasons in Seoul were opinions rather than facts — March insisting it was spring while wearing winter's temperature like borrowed clothing. She did not mention anything personal. She played four listener notes, none of them his.
She uploaded at 2 a.m. and sat in the quiet afterward and thought about a man she had never met in a city she shared with ten million people, sitting somewhere in the dark, deciding.
He listened to Episode 64 on a Wednesday morning, alone, in his apartment, lying on the floor.
He listened to it twice.
He thought about the three weeks she had known and not said. He turned it over carefully, looking for the thing that would make him feel betrayed — looking for the performance, for the manipulation, for the evidence of a game he had been inside without knowing.
He could not find it.
What he found instead, when he was honest about what he found: someone who had received knowledge that would have broken the container, and had sat with it and been afraid, and had chosen to keep the room exactly as he had left it rather than dismantle it in a moment of revelation. That was not manipulation. That was a specific kind of care — the kind that cost the person doing it something rather than nothing.
He listened to her voice in Episode 64 saying: March in Seoul insists on things.
He thought: I know that voice. He had known that voice for six months. He had told that voice things he had never told a room of people or a therapist or the oldest friend he had in the world. The voice had not changed when what lay behind it changed.
It was a million tiny little things, he thought — and the thought arrived not as a sentence but as a weight, a collection, the accumulated mass of Tuesday and Friday and Singapore and Paris and Seoul in the snow and the room I recognize and come home when you can — and when you added them all up, they were the shape of something that meant: we were supposed to be here.
He sent a message through the portal on Friday morning.
[PORTAL MESSAGE — FRIDAY, APRIL 1]
I'm not angry. I want to be clear about that first.
I've been thinking about what it would feel like to have someone know something about me and choose to keep the room safe rather than do anything with the knowing. I've been in situations where people knew things about me and the knowing immediately became something they used — for access, for leverage, for content, for the feeling of being adjacent to something. I've been around that for six years.
You knew. You sat with it for three weeks and you kept Tuesday and Friday exactly as they were, and you kept the voice notes private when I asked, and you said things on air that were directed at me without ever making it about me in a way that cost me anything.
That's not nothing. That's the opposite of nothing.
I want to ask you something: do you listen to the music? Not in a — I'm not asking for approval. I'm asking because I'm trying to understand what you knew before you knew who I was. How much of what you thought you understood about me was correct. Because I'm afraid that what you actually heard in the voice notes and what gets performed in the other context are so different that I'm asking you to believe in the voice without the face and I don't know if that's fair.
She read this twice and then put the phone down and thought for a long time.
Then she typed:
I listened to the album three times before I knew. I thought it was about insomnia, which it partly is, and about the loneliness of travel, and about something I recognized from the podcast but didn't connect. The open window song — I had feelings about it that I was trying not to articulate.
The voice in the notes and the voice in the music are different in production and context and purpose. But underneath both of them: same person. Same rhythm. Same silences.
I'm not in love with your work. I'm in love with a man who lay on hotel floors in European cities and sent me notes about not being able to sleep.
She stared at what she had written for a long time.
She sent it.
She put the phone face-down.
Her hands were shaking very slightly, which was unusual, because she had good emotional regulation as a general rule.
The response came eleven minutes later.
I'd like to be in the same city without the microphone between us. I know I asked before, and things were different then. I'm asking again.
Is Saturday okay.
Chapter Fifteen: April — The Other Side of the Glass
The place he suggested was a small coffee shop in Yeonnam-dong that he had described, three months earlier in a voice note, as one of the only places in Seoul where he felt invisible enough to think. He had not given the name. He had described it precisely enough that she had found it — the one with the green door and the records on the walls and the table by the second window that caught the light in the late afternoon.
She recognized it immediately because she had been there twice.
She arrived seven minutes early and sat at the table by the second window and ordered a coffee with both hands wrapped around the cup, because her hands were still doing the slight thing from the night before, which she was attributing to general circumstance and not specifically to what she was about to do.
It was a Saturday in April. The cherry blossoms along the streets had peaked and begun to fall, which meant the streets looked like what April believed about itself, and the light was doing the thing it did at four in the afternoon in this city where it came in at an angle that made everything look like it was being remembered rather than currently occurring.
She was watching the door.
He came in at 4:08.
She knew him immediately, and not from his face, which she had looked at exactly once before putting the phone away. She knew him from the quality of his attention — the way he scanned the room not with the alert defensiveness of someone used to being recognized, but with a specific looking that was clearly searching for one thing. That particular searching stillness. She had heard it in his silences. She knew it in his body.
He found her.
The moment was nothing like what the movies would do with it — no swelling music, no clean emotional detonation, no dialogue landing with practiced weight. It was simply a man and a woman looking at each other across a small coffee shop for the first time, and the look containing everything that a voice contains: recognition. Relief. The particular terror of having finally arrived somewhere you have been trying to reach for a long time.
He walked to the table. He sat down across from her.
They looked at each other.
"Hi," she said. Her voice was exactly as it sounded on the podcast — warm, careful, with that slight husk of someone who was being honest in real time.
"Hi," he said.
His voice. She had listened to his voice for six months in the dark, and now it was three feet away from her, directed entirely at her, in a room that smelled like coffee and old records, with the April light coming in at the right angle for a thing that was happening that mattered.
It was like coming home to a place she had never been.
She knew that was too much to think within the first fifteen seconds of meeting someone. She thought it anyway.
He had not known what to expect. He had run through versions in his head, the way he ran through scenarios before anything high-stakes — concert openings, media appearances, meetings where the thing on the table was larger than the thing being said. He had imagined various configurations of the meeting: awkward and tender, or formal-becoming-warm, or the particular disaster of reality failing to match six months of constructed feeling.
She was not what he had imagined, and she was also exactly what he had imagined, which was the confusing thing — the way you could know something from a voice so well that the face was simultaneously a surprise and an inevitability.
She had red-chestnut hair and dark eyes and she was holding her coffee cup with both hands wrapped around it in a way that suggested she was cold or nervous or both, and she was looking at him with an expression he recognized from the podcast in a way that was strange, because this was not a face he had heard before. But the expression — that combination of directness and restraint, the thing that opened and then carefully managed the opening — that he knew.
"I listened to Episode 64 four times," he said, because the first thing that came out of his mouth might as well be true.
"I know which part you listened to," she said.
"The March one. The seasons-insisting."
"That was for you."
"I know."
A pause. The coffee shop moved around them — two students at a laptop, a couple near the window, the record player on the counter spinning something old and warm.
"I want to say something," he said, "and I want to say it before we figure out the rest of it, because I think the rest is complicated and I want to say the simple thing first."
She waited. She was good at waiting. He had known this about her.
"When I listen to your voice," he said, "I feel like myself. Not the self I carry around. The one underneath. The one that's still there."
She looked at him for a moment.
"I know," she said. "Your notes do that for me too."
"I know," he said. "You said so. Episode 59."
They looked at each other, and then — simultaneously, and with the slight inevitability of two people who have been circling the same frequency for six months — they both smiled. Not the big public smile she had seen in photographs. A smaller one. The real one.
They talked for three hours.
This was not romantic in the cinematic sense, which was perhaps the most romantic thing about it — no confession scene, no dramatic crossing of the room. They talked the way people talk when they have been saving things up: with the relief of a pressure released, conversation flowing in multiple directions at once, looping back, going deeper. He talked about the tour with the specificity of someone who had been waiting to describe it to someone who would actually hear it. She talked about the podcast the way she had never talked about it to anyone — the things she chose, and why, and what the listener community meant to her.
He knew the specific episodes. He had opinions about her editing choices. He quoted a line back at her from six months ago, word for word, and she looked at him with an expression that was surprise and also not surprise.
"You have a very good memory," she said.
"I have a very good reason," he said.
And she looked at the table and then back at him and they understood each other.
She walked home at seven in the evening through the April streets with cherry blossom petals on the pavement beneath her feet, and she called Mira.
"Well?" Mira said.
"He knows the episodes by number," Hazel said.
A pause.
"Hazel," Mira said.
"I know," Hazel said.
"You're okay?"
"I'm more than okay," she said. "I'm — I'm something without a clean name."
"Geurium?"
"No. The opposite. The thing geurium is the missing of. The presence. The having-arrived."
Another pause, different quality.
"Good," Mira said. "I'm very, very glad."
"Me too," Hazel said.
She kept walking. The petals fell. The city held her, as it always had — generous and awake and indifferent to the enormous things that happened quietly inside it, as enormous things always do.
PART Ⅴ: THE COST OF BEING FOUND
Chapter Sixteen: Public
Hazel had been naive in exactly one respect, and it was a large one.
She had believed — had allowed herself to believe, in the specific hopefulness of the first weeks, when everything was contained and careful and new — that the fan community's theory about the anonymous caller had been speculative enough to remain speculative. Unconfirmed. A theory among theories.
She had underestimated, significantly, the collective intelligence of eight thousand observant people with time, search tools, and genuine investment.
The photograph was taken on their third Saturday meeting, at a different café — one further from Juhoon's usual territory, in a quiet alley in Seongbuk-dong that neither of them had been to before. It was a single photograph, slightly blurred, taken from outside through glass. It showed two people at a table: a young man whose face was partially turned away but identifiable to anyone who had been looking, and a young woman with red-chestnut hair and both hands around a coffee cup.
It appeared on a fan forum on a Sunday morning.
By Monday it had appeared on three Korean entertainment news sites.
By Tuesday it had been picked up by international K-pop coverage.
By Wednesday Hazel had been identified.
The identification was not difficult, in the end. She was a foreign student at a specific university. Her voice was on eighty-eight episodes of a podcast that a large number of people were now searching with the specific intention of finding. Someone found a faculty photo of her from a university event. Someone cross-referenced her voice with the podcast. Someone matched the podcast's general Mangwon geography to the area of the photograph.
The comments were varied. This was the diplomatic way to say it.
Some were warm: she sounds incredible, I've been listening all week. Some were curious: the podcast really is beautiful, you can understand why he likes it. Some were protective of Juhoon in a way that was explicitly hostile toward Hazel: she obviously knew who he was the whole time, this is a manipulation. Some were simply the undifferentiated noise of mass attention, which had no particular content but a quantity that made the podcast inbox unsustainable.
Hazel's listener numbers went from eighty-eight thousand to four hundred thousand in four days.
She did not upload an episode that week. She could not.
She heard from Juhoon's management first — a call from Park Jiyoung, who was professional and efficient and did not make it hostile but made it very clear that the situation required management on multiple fronts, and that the company's position was that both parties should refrain from public statement until a strategy was developed.
She heard from Juhoon second — a message through the portal, which felt, in the circumstances, like someone choosing a room they trusted over one they had been handed.
I'm sorry. I know that's not enough. I'm sorry this came at you this way. Are you okay.
She was not okay. She was the specific kind of not-okay that came from having your quiet careful life suddenly made visible and contested and treated as a narrative by people who had no knowledge of its actual content.
She wrote back:
I'm managing. How are you managing.
They want me to not respond publicly. I disagree. But I understand the argument for it.
What do you want to do?
she wrote.
A pause.
I want to tell them it was real and tell them to be kind to you. I don't know if that helps or hurts.
What Juhoon was not writing to her, because he could not say it without it becoming something he wasn't ready to name, was that the week after the photograph had been the worst one in recent memory — not because of the news cycle, which he had lived through versions of before, but because Martin had knocked on his door on a Tuesday evening and sat down on his couch with the specific expression of a leader who had been quietly watching something develop for months and had now decided that watching was no longer the appropriate posture.
"I listened to it," Martin said.
Juhoon did not ask what.
"The whole archive," Martin said. "I started from the beginning on Sunday." He paused. "She's good, Juhoon. She's really good."
"I know," Juhoon said.
"I listened to the notes you sent her."
"I know."
Martin was quiet for a moment. He had a quality when he was being honest that was different from his performance of honesty — a stillness, something that stopped reaching for effect. It was the quality Juhoon trusted most in him.
"The one from Paris," he said. "About being homesick for a place you've never been."
Juhoon said nothing.
"I didn't know you felt like that," Martin said. "I've been here the whole time and I didn't know."
"It's not — it's not something I could have said in a room," Juhoon said. "That's the whole thing. That was the whole point of it."
Martin nodded slowly, like someone processing the logic of a feeling he hadn't been equipped to receive before.
"Okay," he said. "I get it." He looked at Juhoon directly. "She's real. What you were doing in there was real. I just wanted to say that out loud, because I think you need someone to say it who isn't on the other side of a screen."
Juhoon looked at his hands.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't thank me. Fix it." Martin stood up, with the efficiency of someone who had said the thing and was not going to dilute it by staying too long. "Also Seonghyeon went down a three-hour rabbit hole of the podcast and now he keeps quoting it at me in context. That's on you."
Despite everything, Juhoon laughed.
It was the first time in a week he had laughed at something real.
She sat with this for a while.
Let me think, she wrote.
Chapter Seventeen: The Betrayal She Hadn't Expected
The version of the story that became dominant — the one repeated and reframed across entertainment news cycles and fan forums and social media comment threads — was that Hazel had knowingly pursued a famous person through the guise of an anonymous podcast, had cultivated a relationship while maintaining false ignorance of his identity, and had used the podcast as a platform to launder proximity into intimacy.
This version was wrong. It was also extremely coherent and emotionally satisfying as a story, which made it difficult to displace.
What the version got wrong — what the version necessarily elided — was the order of things. Which was the entire point. She had not known. She had built the room before he arrived. She had fallen in love with the voice before the face, and the face had been a discovery, and the discovery had frightened her before it had done anything else.
The version did not know this. The version had access only to a photograph through a coffee shop window, and a podcast that now had four hundred thousand listeners going through it looking for evidence of design.
She understood, in a way she had not before, what it was to have your interior life narrated by people outside it. She had a new and bone-deep sympathy for what Juhoon had been trying to say in November about the glass — the one you stood behind watching yourself be interpreted.
She also understood, in a way she had not anticipated and did not know how to frame yet, what it felt like to wonder about the version of the story that was wrong.
Not the public version. The private one.
The question she had asked herself in the beginning and then set aside: had the anonymity been the point, or had she been? Was she the room, or was she the person?
She knew, in her honest 3 a.m. self, what she believed. But knowledge and fear coexisted. They had always coexisted in her — she was a person made of careful knowing and still-present fear, and she had made her peace with that most of the time.
Most of the time.
She sent him a message on a Thursday, twelve days after the photograph.
[PORTAL MESSAGE — THURSDAY, APRIL 21]
I've been thinking about something, and I want to say it clearly because I think we owe each other clarity in proportion to how much we've owed each other honesty.
I don't want to be someone you're settling for. I don't mean that the way it sounds at first — I don't mean settling as in compromise. I mean: I don't want to be the version that was safe and anonymous and required nothing from you except what you chose to give. I don't want to be the podcast. I want to be the person.
But I'm also — I'm afraid that the podcast was the person, and that the person is not separate from it, and that when the podcast becomes four hundred thousand strangers looking for a story, the person inside it gets — smaller. Less distinct. I am afraid of being less distinct.
I know who you are now. I knew before, but now I know it differently — I know it the way the world knows it, which is a lot of information and very little of it true. And I'm afraid that the world's version of you is going to be the version I'm dealing with now, and not the man on the floor in Singapore who sent me a note about rain.
Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me what's actually happening in there. Not the version that gets managed. The floor version.
The response came two hours later, which was fast by his standards — she had learned the timing of his thinking.
[PORTAL MESSAGE — THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 11:52 P.M.]
The floor version is this:
I am frightened that you are going to decide that the distance between our lives is not crossable and that the math is wrong and that I am too much — not as a person, but as a thing to be attached to in the world. I am frightened that the month the world spent narrating us has cost you something you didn't choose to spend.
I am frightened that you heard the voice and the voice was enough, and then the voice got a body with a world attached to it, and the world is not what you signed up for.
I do not know how to make the world smaller. I have been trying to do that for six years. I have not succeeded.
What I know: the man in Singapore is the same one who sat across from you in the café. He had different things to carry around him, but he's the same. The floor version and the performance version are the same person in different weather. You have met both. You know which one is which.
I'm not settling. I'm the opposite of settling. I have spent six years in rooms built by other people and you were the first room I walked into that felt like mine.
You asked me to tell you what's actually happening in there. That's what's happening in there.
Tell me what to do next.
She read this four times.
She sat in the quiet of her apartment with the city breathing through the window and the radiator muttering under the sill and the April darkness holding everything at arm's length except the thing it couldn't hold, which was this.
She had told Mira she was afraid of being the container. She had been.
She had told herself she was afraid the anonymity had been the point. She had been.
And now she had his words on a screen at midnight — the first room I walked into that felt like mine — and the fear was still there, the way fear is always still there, but it was smaller than the other thing, which was this:
She believed him.
She typed:
Come to Friday's episode. Not on air. Just come to where I am. I'll leave the window open.
Chapter Eighteen: Friday
He knew the neighborhood but not the building. She sent him the address through the portal at 10 p.m. on Friday, with a message that said: fourth floor. The light will be on.
She had considered, on the way home from campus that day, what she would say. She had arrived at: nothing prepared. Prepared things were a performance and she was done with performances, was actively evacuating them from her life. She was going to be exactly who she was in the dark at 2 a.m. with the microphone and the open window, which was the truest version available.
She set up for recording at midnight — the usual spot, the usual microphone, the window open to April. She pressed record and began talking about the city.
She talked for twelve minutes. About rain in Mangwon. About the cherry blossoms that were finished now, turned to leaves that didn't announce themselves, just quietly continued. About loneliness not as a weather condition this time but as a language — something you became fluent in, that let you recognize when someone was speaking it, that created the specific grammar of understanding between two people who had been practicing in the same room.
She heard the buzzer at 12:23 a.m.
She pressed pause. She went to the intercom and let him in and stood at the open door of her apartment while he came up the stairs — fifth floor, no elevator, and she heard him take them with a deliberateness that told her he was not rushing. Either because he was tired or because he understood that this moment, like the good moments, required a different pace.
He appeared at the top of the stairs.
He was wearing an ordinary coat. A hat he hadn't bothered to pull low, because it was 12:23 a.m. and the building was empty. He looked — she searched for the word and found it exactly: himself. The floor version. The one underneath.
She stepped back. He came in.
She had tidied the apartment, which was not its usual state, which was comfortable-and-lived-in; she had returned it to comfortable-and-lived-in after tidying it and then deciding that tidying it was itself a performance. The microphone was on its stand. The window was open. The radiator was doing its thing. The city was audible in the specific way it was audible on eighty-eight episodes of Sleepless in Seoul, which he knew well enough to have described it once as sounding like a city that had made peace with being awake.
He stood in the middle of the room and looked around.
"It's exactly like I imagined," he said. "Smaller."
"Everyone says that," she said.
"I'm not — I mean it as a compliment. It fits you. It fits the voice."
She looked at him standing in the middle of her small exact apartment and thought of all the things he had said in the dark, in the private portal messages and the voice notes and the episode where he had said I think I might be homesick for a place I've never been and she had thought: I know exactly what you mean.
"Sit down," she said. "I was in the middle of recording."
He sat on the edge of her bed — the only available sitting surface — with the particular care of someone who was trying not to displace anything. She sat back in her chair and looked at the microphone and then at him.
"Can I keep going?" she said.
He looked at her steadily.
"Yes," he said.
She pressed record.
SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 67 — FRIDAY, APRIL 29 [HOST]
"It's after midnight. The city is doing its city things — delivery bikes, a distant siren, the specific wet-street sound of cars on wet asphalt after rain.
I have something to tell you, and I'm going to tell it as directly as I know how to, which means I'm going to start in the wrong place and find my way to the right one.
Six months ago, someone started sending voice notes to this podcast. I don't know if you remember. Some of you do, based on the comments. He was a man who couldn't sleep — which is how most of you found me — and he spoke carefully, the way someone speaks when they are afraid of using more words than they mean. He talked about hotels and cities and the specific loneliness of being surrounded. He asked questions he answered himself.
Over six months, I fell in love with his voice.
I want to be clear about the order of operations: I fell in love with a voice, and then a voice note became a written message, and a written message became a café on a Saturday, and a café on a Saturday became someone sitting on the edge of my bed at 12:30 a.m. while I finish recording.
I know that some of you have been part of a story about us that has gotten a lot of things in the wrong order. I understand why the wrong order felt more like a story. I understand the grammar of suspicion. I've felt it myself — the particular fear that a thing you love was built rather than found.
But I want to say this clearly, into the microphone, for the record, for the night:
It was built. Everything good is built. You build it one small honest thing at a time, until you look at what you've made and realize it has the shape of something that feels like home.
It was also found. Because you don't get to choose which voices reach you through the dark, or which ones fit the exact shape of the missing place in your chest.
Both things are true. Both things were ours.
I'm not going to say his name. He can introduce himself if he wants to. But he's here, and this room is his too, and I wanted you to know that some things that start in the dark end up in the light, and the light doesn't change them — it just lets you see what was already there."
She stopped recording.
The silence had a particular quality — the specific silence that follows the truest thing you've said in a room.
She looked at him.
He had been very still while she spoke. His hands on his knees, his head very slightly bowed. The specific stillness she recognized from his silences on the voice notes, when something had landed and he was in the process of receiving it.
He looked up.
His face was doing something she hadn't seen yet — hadn't seen in the photograph or the café or the three hours of talking or the twelve days of distance. Something that had come unstuck.
"You said it out loud," he said.
"Yes."
"On the podcast."
"Yes."
"To four hundred thousand people."
"Plus the ones who don't listen live and will find it Saturday."
Something moved across his face that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one — the relief of something long-held finally put down.
"I didn't know if you were going to do that," he said.
"Neither did I, until I did."
He stood up. He was not particularly dramatic about it. He crossed the three feet of apartment between the bed and the recording chair with the care of someone who had been practicing arrival for a long time.
He stopped just in front of her. Close enough to see the small scar above her left eyebrow that she had mentioned, three episodes ago, in the context of a childhood story about a bicycle. Close enough to be in the room rather than adjacent to it.
"I want to say something on the record," he said.
She looked up at him.
"Say it," she said.
"My name is Kim Juhoon." He said it with the slight formality of someone who had not said his name unperformed in a very long time. "I'm from Incheon. I'm twenty-six years old. I cannot sleep in hotels and I have six plants and I prefer the floor to the bed when I'm thinking, and I've been in love with a podcast host since November, which is not something I expected to be able to say to her face."
He paused.
"Also," he said, "your apartment is exactly what I imagined."
"You said it was smaller."
"I said it was smaller than I imagined. That's not a criticism. I'm bad at scale."
She laughed — surprised, real, unguarded in the way she was only at 2 a.m. when the performance had fallen away. He had heard that laugh in exactly one episode when she had forgotten herself describing a pigeon that had walked directly through a café with the confidence of someone who had made a reservation. He had listened to it three times.
He reached out and took her hand.
The city breathed through the window. The radiator muttered. Somewhere below, a delivery bike turned a corner and was gone.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," she said.
PART Ⅵ: AFTER MIDNIGHT — THE SHAPE OF HOME
Chapter Nineteen: May
May arrived, as it always does, with the quality of a season that has remembered what it was supposed to be.
The tree at the corner of Hazel's street — a ginkgo that had been bare in November and gold in October and bare again in February — was fully green now, deeply and specifically green, the particular green of something that has been through winter and has come back with the knowledge of having come back. The evenings were long and warm and the city was doing what it did in spring, which was to believe in itself with renewed enthusiasm.
Three things happened in May.
The first was that Hazel's listener numbers stabilized at two hundred and forty thousand, which was not the four hundred thousand of the scandal's peak but was triple what she had before, and the quality of the listener base had improved in the way that things improve when the casual observers move on and the genuine ones remain. The comments section was, largely, full of people who had found the podcast for the wrong reasons and stayed for the right ones — who had come looking for a story and found something stranger and quieter and more honest than a story.
The second was that Juhoon appeared on a podcast interview — a different one, a music industry one — and was asked about the past month and gave an answer that became, briefly, the top trending clip in the entertainment category for four days:
"I listened to a podcast for six months. It helped me sleep, which sounds simple. It was not simple. I think sometimes you find the frequency of a person before you find the person — you understand what they are before you understand who they are. That's what happened. And I think it means that when you arrive at the actual person, you already know them in the most important way."
The interviewer had asked whether the podcast in question was Sleepless in Seoul.
He had smiled with the small real smile and said: "I think you already know that."
The clip received fourteen million views.
The third thing was that Hazel finished recording Episode 72 at 1:45 a.m. on a Tuesday and turned the microphone off and found Juhoon asleep on her bed — not having planned to be, but simply having been there since eleven and having drifted off somewhere in the middle of Episode 71's playback editing, which she took as a compliment of the highest order: to fall asleep somewhere was to trust it.
She stood in the doorway of her own bedroom and looked at him sleeping and thought about the million tiny little things. The voice note from Singapore. The conversation about geurium. The Paris hotel room. The floor at 3 a.m. The green door in Yeonnam-dong. The sound of him coming up five flights of stairs at 12:23 a.m. on a Friday night in April, not rushing.
It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, meant they were supposed to be here. Not in some predestined cosmic sense. In the sense that people build inevitabilities from choices, from frequencies, from the specific habit of being honest in the dark until the dark becomes something you can live in together.
She turned off the overhead light. She sat in her recording chair with the window open and the city breathing and wrote the first paragraph of Episode 72 by hand in the notebook she kept for drafts:
Tonight I want to talk about home as a verb.
Epilogue: Sleepless in Seoul— Episode 75
TRANSCRIPT — TUESDAY, JUNE 7 — 2:08 A.M.
"It's raining in Seoul tonight. I know I've said that before. I say it every time it's true because it's always true in a slightly different way, and tonight it's the warm summer rain that arrives without warning and doesn't particularly care whether you have an umbrella.
I've been doing this for almost two years. Seventy-five episodes. I started talking into a microphone at 2 a.m. because I couldn't sleep and I liked my city and I needed somewhere to put things, and what I found was that a lot of you couldn't sleep either, and needed somewhere too, and that the somewhere could be shared.
I want to say something I haven't said in exactly this way before.
Thank you. For being awake with me. For sending voice notes at 1 a.m. and trusting the dark with things you hadn't said out loud. For the woman in Busan who called herself Insomniac No. 4 and who I know is listening tonight because she told me she always does. For the student with the plants. For the man in Itaewon who misses his kids in a way that makes my throat tight every single time. For everyone who arrived at this podcast looking for something and found a different thing than they expected.
Some of you found love here, at least one of you has told me. Some of you found the word for what you were feeling. Some of you found permission to not be okay, which is a different and equally important thing.
I found something too.
I want to talk about what I found, briefly, at the risk of making something private public in a way it isn't quite ready for — but the risk feels worth it because the people who listen at 2 a.m. are the people who can be trusted with the soft things.
I found that love arrives in the order it arrives. Not when you plan for it. Not in the form you're prepared for. It arrives in voices before faces, in honesty before names, in the specific recognition of a silence that fits your own silences.
I found that being known — really known, below the version you carry around — is not a disaster. It is, it turns out, the thing we were all awake looking for.
I'm still looking for a lot of things. I'm still awake at 2 a.m. with the window open. But I am looking in the right direction.
The frequency, if you're listening, is still on.
Come home when you can.
Sleepless in Seoul will be back Friday. Keep the window open. I'll be here."
[FROM THE PODCAST INBOX — RECEIVED TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2:31 A.M.]
[NOT AIRED — KEPT]
"I'm here.
I heard the episode. I heard all of them, every single one, and I will keep hearing them for as long as you keep making them.
The frequency is still on. I'm still on it.
Come find me in the morning. I'll make coffee.
— J"
[RESPONSE — SENT 2:34 A.M.]
"The window is open.
Good night.
— H"
THE END
Author's Note on the novel's epigraph:
The line "It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, meant we were supposed to be together" is adapted from Sleepless in Seattle (1993, dir. Nora Ephron). This novel is written in admiration of Ephron's belief that love is specific, cumulative, and — above all — worth the waiting.
再見 ★ you and chao yufan were alike in the sense that you treated everything like a competition, and missed that the basis of human connection is cooperation and harmony. similarly, you were alike in the sense that you both forgot that in competition, there can only be one winner, and that the path to victory is paved with heartbreak and betrayal.
warnings ★ swearing, angst, mentions of sports-related injuries, reader whacks james over the head with a hockey stick (gently), both reader and james are stubborn brats, hella artistic liberties, reader being a foreigner is integral to the story, kissing, arguing, in-depth depictions and descriptions of injuries and panic attacks, unhealthy dynamics, age gap wherein james is older, i really milked all the angst i could out of this one guys i’m sorry, also my inaccurate descriptions of winter sports and really bad mandarin and hokkien sprinkled throughout. lmk if i missed any!
genre ★ nonidol au, sports au, strangers to friends, friends into lovers, and strangers again, mutual dislike to lovers, romance, sports drama, angst, figureskater!reader, hockeyplayer!james, brief figureskater!juhoon cameo, james x reader
word count ★ 30.9k
notes ★ for my talented girl. skye, you mean the world to me. since i can’t tell you directly how proud i am of you and how wonderful you are, i did it in the second best way i knew how: a 30k word angst fic with your bias and one of your forgotten passions. i hope i did it justice, mi amor.
listen to… back in taipei, and for the skating scenes, short programs and free skates!
YOU ONCE HAD A friend who hated airports. When you’d asked him, thoroughly perplexed and half in disbelief, he’d told you that it was because it meant departure. People left, and wouldn’t be able to see their loved ones until they returned. It reminded him of his mother leaving, he said, whenever she went to her home country and couldn’t bring him along.
You saw things differently. You saw them with the eyes of someone who wished to travel to lands of new opportunity, to places where you could leave your old self behind and start anew. A new place meant new people, new experiences, new sights, new outlooks on life. It reminded you of when you arrived in your new home country, young and naive and full of dreams.
It was in this way and many others that you and Chao Yufan differed.
Funnily enough, the first time you met him was in an airport. Or, well, close to one.
北京 BEIJING
2022
You were beat. While the flight from Taipei to Beijing wasn’t far, or long, or truly anything that warranted your current exhaustion, your endless training of the past week certainly was. Your limbs ached with overexertion as you climbed off the aeroplane, hauling your carry-on with you while your coach, Peiling, walked purposefully several paces in front of you.
The airport was busy as you made your way to the baggage claim area, filled to the brim with families and couples on their way to and from different places in the world. The energy was overwhelming in a manner that made your words fail you. The atmosphere was emotionally charged, charged with the weight of families separating for the holidays, or a couple reunited after a business trip. Teenagers leaving home, adults returning. It made the air smell sweet with emotion, tears and smiles and laughs and sobs all to be heard and experienced in scenes within mere metres of one another.
You, like several other athletes on your flight, had travelled to Beijing for the Junior Asian Winter Games to represent their country on an international scale. It wasn’t too big of an event, featuring only competitors from a few countries across the continent, but for someone of your calibre—who’d only ever performed locally—it was like landing on Mars. More important, in fact. All Mars had was craters and buggies. Beijing had everything.
It had been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity given to you by a bored sponsor who had nowhere better to spend their money, but you didn’t care what it was that brought you here. All that mattered was that you’d made it, and you wouldn’t let the opportunity to make the best of it pass you by.
Baggage claim was as busy as the rest of the airport, filled to the brim with people fighting over who deserved to take their luggage first, who deserved to wait, and who deserved to lose an eye for the Louis Vitton suitcase that had made its tenth rotation without any sign of its owner stepping forward to claim it. You paused at the sight; the crowd, moving like one angry, sleep-deprived entity, and in a split second decided it would be physically safer for you to give up taking your luggage before you even started trying.
Unfortunately, you were travelling with an even angrier, even more sleep-deprived middle aged coach who was not about to waste her precious dollars simply because of your crippling anxiety, and so, you ventured into the storm.
As you made your way to the mechanical spiral which rotated everyone’s bags like a silent urge for them to step up and claim what was theirs, your shoulders continuously bumped by nainais out for blood, you thought to yourself that whoever said the eye of the storm was the calmest bit was a dirty liar and a certain cheat. You yelped when an older gentleman pushed you cleanly out of the way, your hard-earned strength failing you in the moment of shock. Peiling yelled something at him in her Northern drawl and he backed off immediately. After that terrifying interaction, you simply kept to the sides, the areas where people didn’t bother to wait, your gaze fixed on the moving conveyor belt, on the lookout for a large suitcase with a bright, shiny pink shell.
It was after a few moments of staring and zoning out that you spotted it, pointing towards it with a victorious sound as if your newfound powers of voice-activated telekinesis would make the thing levitate towards you. Alas, it did not, and you had to use your hands and arms like the rest of the world.
You picked it up with quite a bit of effort, less because you’d overpacked and more because whatever equipment you couldn’t fit in your carry-on had been thrown into your suitcase, which, given Beijing’s tight policies on carry-on weight, was most of it. You nodded to Peiling, widening your eyes as if to say, I’ve got it. We can go. She gave you a quick thumbs up and turned to leave, and you followed shortly after.
Sunset had inched over the horizon by the time you made it outside, the cold November air hitting your face and freezing your cheeks. Peiling raised her one free hand to hail a cab, pushing you into the open backseat once it arrived. You took a heavy seat while she loaded your luggage into the boot before finally joining you, sighing like an old man with joint issues. You watched in silent amusement as she got settled, noticed your stare, and smacked your arm, clicking her tongue in disapproval. “Aiya, you’re such a badly behaved child. Don’t laugh at your elders like that.”
“I wasn’t laughing!” you objected, though the giggle that you fought said differently.
She tsked. “Whatever. You and the rest of the athletes from Taiwan will be staying in the same hotel for the week that we’re here. Lights are out at nine, and you will be awake by six. I will not wake you up. Understood?”
“Yes, coach,” you said, still grinning like an idiot.
“Ai,” came the voice of your driver, fast-paced and slurred as you’d been told the Beijingers spoke. “You going to tell me where you want to go, or what?”
Peiling made a noise of irritation, but supplied nonetheless, “The Starlight Five Star, shifu. By Wonder Ice Sports Centre.”
He input the location in his GPS, asking, “You here for the Games?”
Peiling nodded. “Mm.”
He didn’t say anything after that, but you could see him nodding to himself as he drove off. Peiling leaned back in her seat, muttering something about Mainlanders before she asked you, “By the way, when did you add those stickers to your suitcase?”
You’d stolen someone’s suitcase.
This, you realised after you’d flopped unceremoniously onto your bed as Peiling made herself comfortable in her joint bedroom, zipping it open and finding it chock full of men’s clothes. Now, you weren’t necessarily the most outwardly feminine girl in the world, but you’d never gone as far as shopping in the men’s section, so you knew there was no way these clothes could’ve possibly been yours. Furthermore, the likelihood that you’d taken someone else’s luggage by mistake was only a bit higher than that of someone stealing all your clothes and replacing it with men’s clothes in some sort of sick act of villainy.
You sat up straight, a small, confused noise leaving your mouth as you rummaged through the stranger’s luggage in growing panic. Where you’d stored your signature leg warmers now were a pair of basketball shorts big enough to fit someone three times your size; where you’d packed a variety of hair products and creams for competition day, someone had carelessly chucked in a pair of shin guards and stocky gloves. And most importantly, where you’d neatly folded up the custom-made leotard your coach had spent half her life savings on, was simply a copy of some sort of anime film on DVD.
“What the hell is this?” you muttered, tossing more tubes of chapstick than was necessary for a man behind you, searching as if you’d find the contents of your suitcase beneath the layers and layers of his things. “How in the hell did this happen?”
“…When did you add those stickers to your suitcase?”
Your eyes widened, falling back onto your heels as a wave of realisation swept over you like the salty sea rollers on Fulong Beach. This wasn’t your suitcase. You’d taken someone else’s luggage, and were now armed with all the wrong equipment one day before the biggest competition of your career so far.
Ah, crap.
You groaned in frustration, dragging a hand over your face as you flopped onto your back, head falling against the soft, heavenly hotel pillows you’d be sleeping on for the night. Unfortunately, you were far too stressed to even be able to enjoy them.
From somewhere on the other side of your room, behind the door that joined Peiling’s with yours, you heard her shout, “What happened now?”
When you didn’t answer, she pestered, “Tell me why you sound like you’re dying, la!”
“I took someone else’s luggage at the airport!” you yelled back, screwing your eyes shut in embarrassment and exhaustion at your own uselessness. Maybe if you’d glanced at it more than once, or waited for another rotation you’d see that it clearly wasn’t your suitcase despite the uncanny resemblance it bore to it. For starters, it looked more worn, with chips and scratch marks yours didn’t have. The owner had customised it as well, with stickers and tags and his name and number in permanent ink and—
You sat up again, this time with more purpose as you recognised the familiar traditional characters jump in front of your eyes. Even after all these years, it took some time for you to be able to decipher every letter, but after a moment or two, you could fully read what was in front of you, murmuring the words as you went.
“If lost, please return to…” you narrowed your eyes, squinting to read the handwritten scrawl in the low light of your hotel room, “…please return to James Chao.” Then, beneath the message, the ten digits that would lead you to him.
Your one-eighty reaction must’ve given Peiling quite the scare, because when you yelped in victory and started shoving the stranger’s belongings back into his suitcase, slamming the pink shell shut and already reaching to your bedside table for your phone, she opened the door and rushed into your room, stormy eyes widened in an expression of shock. “What is it? Why are you making such noise so late at night?”
She looked a bit ridiculous, her dewy, done-up skin and fuzzy robe doing little to add to the shock and growing frustration in her voice.
“I stole someone else’s suitcase,” you said, rehashing the previous moments’ occurrences to her, “but then I saw that the owner wrote his name and number on the front, so I can call him and find him and get my suitcase back because, you know, since we have the same suitcase, it’s only right to assume he’d taken mine—anyway, I can find him and get my suitcase back as well, hopefully before the competition tomorrow.”
She gave you a long stare, before nodding in the way that told you she’d believe what you said, but that whatever you did was your responsibility. “Alright,” she murmured. “But you can’t rely on hope. You better pray to Mother Guanyin that this pans out, because if not, I’ll have you compete in sweatpants and borrowed skates. Understood?”
You shivered in equal parts horror and disgust. “Yes, coach.”
Peiling shook her head in obvious disappointment, while you made a mission of dialling the stranger’s number to call him. The phone rang for several moments before he picked up—chrrr… chrrr… chrrr…
“Yes?” came the voice of a very irritated James Chao. You could imagine him, the stranger, his face a blur of what his voice brought to mind, his brow furrowed in frustration. His voice was gentle, but persistent, raspy, a bit nasally in a way that wasn’t too annoying just yet.
What a bad time to be an introvert. And what an even worse time to be someone who performed badly socially under even the slightest bit of pressure. “Um, hi. I, uh… I’m…” You paused, giving him your name, and then, “I think I may have something of yours.”
The other line was silent for a moment. Then, “You better be the person who has my suitcase.”
“I am,” you said. “It’s a pink Louis Vitton with stickers and shit all over it, right? And it has, like, I don’t know what kind of equipment—”
“Hockey equipment,” he answered for you, with more snark than was truly necessary. “And yours has a bunch of sparkly tutus and, like, a shit ton of lip gloss. And… footless socks?”
“Leg warmers,” you corrected, more defensive than you’d meant to be. “They’re leg warmers. I’m a figure skater. I use leg warmers. My socks have feet.”
“Alright, okay,” he acquiesced. “Where are you?”
“The Starlight Five Star,” you said. “Right by—”
“Wonder Ice in Beijing,” he interrupted, a seconds’ realisation spoken into existence. You could imagine him furrowing his brows as he further grasped, “You’re Taiwanese.”
“I grew up there,” you corrected, brain on autopilot. You were used to pointing out the difference to people. “Not Taiwanese Taiwanese, but—”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re in Beijing to compete, right?” You nodded like he could see you, and he continued, “All of us are on the seventh floor. Find me in front of the elevator in fifteen minutes, and we can swap our bags. Got it?”
“Okay,” you said, nodding definitively. The longer you spoke to James, the more eager you were to hang up and get the interaction over and done with. “See you then.”
His final words to you were, “Yeah, whatever.”
Once you’d told Peiling what you’d arranged with James, and she let you go with a firm nod and an encouraging smack on your shoulder, you pulled on a jumper over your pyjamas and lugged the stolen suitcase out of your room and down the carpeted hallway. The elevator was several paces to the right of your room—because the event organisers loved you so much, they’d stuck you in the furthest corner of the seventh floor, meaning you had to walk past the skiing and curling teams who, in spite of the nine o’clock cutoffs for all athletes, were all still hooting and hollering like they were at a house party.
Your feet thumped gently on the carpeted floor as you made your way down the hall, James’ suitcase rolling silently behind you. You stopped at the elevator, as discussed, turning your head this way and that in search of someone to match your current state: tired, pyjama’d, and in the mood for business.
James Chao first appeared before you that night you’d accidentally taken his suitcase and he yours, long after the athletes’ curfew and only a few hours before both of you would be competing the following morning. Black hair swept over a pair of dark eyes narrowed in apparent frustration, smooth, tanned skin glowing under the warm lights of the hotel as he frowned like he’d been personally wronged. Which, if he was nearly as dramatic as he’d sounded on the phone, may or may not have been his personal truth. A baggy graphic shirt and basketball shorts swallowed the lean figure beneath, and just as you were about to get a proper look at him, he said,
“You scratched it.”
You paused. “What?”
“My suitcase. You scratched it.”
Frowning, you looked down at the hard shell in your hold, looking no less damaged than it had when you’d taken it from baggage claim. “Um, sorry,” you said anyway, because you weren’t in the mood to prove your innocence currently. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s whatever,” he dismissed. His voice was clearer in real life. I mean, of course it was, but, you know. He shook his head, looking as eager to get back to his hotel room as you were. “Anyway, uh, here’s your suitcase back.”
He rolled it out from behind him, and you did the same. For a moment or two, you both stood there in virtual silence, staring down at the other’s suitcase. You swore you heard crickets once the silence stretched to thirty seconds. Then, with just as many words as you’d exchanged beforehand, which is to say, none, you switched bags, and balance was restored to the universe once more.
James looked up at you, sent you a firm, definitive nod. You did the same. Despite the moments leading up to the interaction being less than desirable, you completed what needed to be done, and did so without that much of an issue.
Or so you thought.
As you turned to make your way back to your room, your suitcase rolling behind you, footsteps joined by the sound of James’ own, you heard him stop, slipper-clad feet skidding to a halt on the carpeted floor. Stop. Pause. Turn.
“You went through my stuff.”
You stopped. Paused. Turned. “Yeah,” you admitted, eyes narrowed in that same way that people who are in an outlandishly drawn out and overdone interaction do, the same way someone who shouldn’t have to be explaining themselves does. “I thought it was my bag, so I opened it up.”
“And, what, you just mess up your entire suitcase the moment you open it?” he asked. Oh, he was getting far too bratty for your liking.
You stepped forward, the movement like an accusation. “How do you even notice something like that?” you asked nonsensically. “Something so… so minute, so minuscule—”
“Big words for someone of your size,” he spat, equally as nonsensical.
“What the hell is that even supposed to mean?”
“You know damn well what it means!”
You threw up your hands in a gesture that you were sure conveyed your frustration, exhaustion, and impending insanity all at once. “What is your problem?!”
“What’s yours?”
You pointed at him frantically, as if he were the obvious answer. “You! You’re my problem!”
He pointed right back, index finger in your face and all. “And you’re mine! I have a game at seven tomorrow morning and I’m standing here arguing with you!”
“Oh, trust me, I do not want to be stuck defending myself against a diva with a competition only a few hours ahead of me,” you said. “The feeling is horridly mutual.”
He scoffed. “You’re such a pain.”
Before you got a chance to retort at all, much less properly, James turned on his heel and left, walking with the conviction of a man scorned. The last you saw of him was him walking down the hall, hips swaying this way and that with more sass than you felt was fit for a man.
And because you were so very mature, such an emotionally intelligent young woman who knew when to walk away from a confrontation, you turned and left once you grew sick of staring at his departing form, muttering to yourself, “Stupidhead.”
You hoped you never had to see his dumb face again.
台北 TAIPEI
TWO WEEKS LATER
It was only you in the rink before he arrived.
You swept across the ice, legs moving as if by their own will. The cold stung your cheeks and creeped in through your tights, the sort of cold that sat in the back of your mind while the rest of your body burnt with exertion, limbs starting to ache from the push and pull of temperatures. Music drifted from the speaker you’d placed somewhere outside the rink, possibly in the stands where you’d left your personal belongings, slow and melodic and not at all matching your current mood.
You huffed in frustration as yet another Salchow failed to come to fruition, the edge of your skate blade as uncooperative as it had been for the past several training sessions. Something about the way you moved, or the angle of your foot, or the ice—something had to be wrong, and you needed to find out what it was and fix it.
Peiling had told you that your second place performance in Beijing was good enough, which was rather uncharacteristic for her. She’d always been the one to push you to the edge, to test the limits of your abilities and patience. Her simply throwing in the towel and saying your performance in an international competition was good enough meant something. It meant she thought you were tired. Losing your edge. In a rut.
You were determined to prove her wrong.
Minutes turned into hours that you’d spent at the rink back in Taipei after your usual practice session; the rink where you’d first put on skates, where you’d spent birthdays and Christmases and good days and bad days on the ice. Where you’d found your purpose.
It seemed the longer you tried to perfect your moves, to swivel your body or sweep your skates a certain way, the more you seemed to be failing. Shinya Kiyozuka and his upbeat, romantic masterpieces weren’t exactly helping your mood, either, though you weren’t sure if anything else would. Maybe you were just being impossible today.
You knew every athlete had their off days. Days where nothing seemed to stick, where they seemed to forget everything they’d learnt until that point. Days where the universe didn’t seem to be ruling in their favour, where their coaches and teammates patted them on the back and said, “Maybe next time.” But you weren’t that sort of athlete, the sort that could afford to be bad for a day.
In between the jump and twists and the growing cold and the flakes of ice floating through the air you failed to notice the double doors of the rink swinging open languidly, nor the set of footsteps that came afterwards. You bent your knee deeply, gliding backwards with your leg raised, before planting it into the ice, twirling into the air, one, two, three times, arms raised high above your head. A simple triple flip, but it was more than you’d been able to achieve all day.
A sharp sound rang through the air. Once, twice, thrice before it gave way to a neverending cacophony that made you turn your head. Someone was clapping, approaching with their hands set in a lazy position of applause. It echoed throughout the entire rink, travelling across the ice and straight to your ears; piercing, the sort of sound that made people flinch.
James walked towards the ice with an undeniable swagger in his step, not unlike his gait when you first met him. Though, could you say met, when the whole interaction lasted less than five minutes? He looked different this time, more put together, standing taller, like he owned the world and it owed him everything. A jacket hung loosely around his frame, opening just enough to show the graphic tee he’d most likely hand-selected, silky black hair in meticulous tousles.
“What are you doing here?” were your first words to him since Beijing.
He didn’t say anything, hopping down the steps that led to the rink in silence, hands still braced for applause. Only until he reached the ice, leaning against the barrier separating you from normal ground did he say anything. He smiled, and it was difficult to deduce if it was friendly or not. “You’re pretty good, ice queen.”
You stayed planted in the middle of the ice that reflected white on your black stockings, matched your white leg warmers. You crossed your arms over your chest, not caring if the action made you appear petulant. “You say that like it’s a surprise. What are you doing here?”
While you couldn’t confidently assert that his face fell, there was a loss of amusement in his expression when it became clear you wouldn’t play ball with him. “I’m just here for some solo practice,” he explained, lifting the large duffel bag he’d slung across his front.
You paused. “You skate here, too?”
“Not during the week, usually,” he admitted. “But today’s a special day, it seems like. Practice got cancelled and my usual roller hockey rink is booked right now. So—” he grinned again, quick and sly— “here I am. And here you are. My problem.”
You were sure he meant it jokingly; as you could tell by the obvious switch from serious to sarcastic in his tone of voice. He was simply referencing the last time you met, when you called him your problem and he called you his. But there was something about the way he said it this time, snarkier and perhaps even more arrogant than before, derision in place of anger, that made you want to roll your eyes to the back of your head. What about him, exactly, enraged you so?
You’d find out soon enough.
Turning your back to him, you continued your desperate swipes and turns to try and mimic someone who knew what the hell they were doing. You weren’t convinced that you succeeded.
James watched, thankfully silent, leaned all the while against the barrier. Somewhere in between your several flutzes, he’d pulled on his gear; knee pads and skates and silver chains that dangled as he hopped over onto the ice, floundering a bit from the extravagant entrance.
“I watched you at the Games.”
This made you stop and, once again, turn towards the boy. You could guess he was a year or two older than you—not from how he spoke or composed himself, but from something deeper that told you things about him he didn’t even need to say himself. It was that same something that had told you to trust him down the line, the same something everyone has, telling them things they know about people they don’t. It’s important to remember that you can’t always trust when that something speaks.
“Oh, yeah?” you asked with feigned disinterest he’d never catch onto. “Thought you had a match at seven.”
“I did,” he said. “And your performance was at nine.” He skated towards you, gliding easily. “The rink you performed in was a five minute walk from ours.” He shrugged then, adding, “A few friends and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about after we won our match.”
“And?” you prodded. “Was it worth your time?”
“I’d say so, yeah.” He shifted one leg in front of the other, movements calm and effortless. “You’re pretty good.”
You preened at the compliment despite it being from someone you weren’t too fond of at that moment, because, like any teenager, you were a bit full of yourself when it came to the things you were good at.
James tilted his head. “But you’re too gentle.”
You scoffed. Too gentle. There was no such thing in a sport as graceful as figure skating. It didn’t matter that Peiling had told you the same thing three sessions ago, that your attempts at poise had made your art lacking. James didn’t need to know that. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He didn’t let up. “I see what you try to do in your moves, it just translates wrong on the ice. Your gracefulness comes across as hesitance; that’s why you only got second place.”
You scowled, ignoring the pinch in your heart. He was a stranger who knew nothing about your craft, not even the simplest thing. Why would you need to listen to him? “I don’t need you to explain skating to me,” you snapped. His unwanted presence and unneeded commentary had become too much to bear. “I got in second because I slipped. Not because of anything you might’ve convinced yourself is relevant.”
“Listen, all I wanna do is help,” he tried, nearing you. In turn, you glided backwards, intent on keeping your distance. “You wanna win, don’t you?”
“What’s it to you?” you muttered.
“Nothing,” he confessed. “It’s not important to me. But it could be important to you.”
A long stretch of silence followed. You stayed where you were, James only a few paces ahead. From what you could see, he meant nothing ill by his words, though there was still something that kept you from replying just yet. Maybe it was your own scepticism. It was an odd scene, an odd interaction; the sort that comes so unexpectedly that you don’t even have the slightest idea of how to continue, so all you really can do is just that.
“You don’t look Taiwanese.”
“I’m not,” he said, “technically. Dad’s from Hong Kong and my mom is Thai.”
“Yet you play in the national youth league?” you asked.
“Yep.”
“Must be nice.”
He nodded, the action softer compared to his previous ones. While Taiwan had many excellent foreign athletes to represent the country, it took a lot of exceptional skill—more so than the locals required, many cried—for them to make it out of the foreign leagues they were so kindly sorted into. James could only imagine how hard it must’ve been on foreign kids, when he himself worked so hard to keep his place in the league as a local.
Then, with the finesse of a newborn fawn walking on solid ground for the first time, you switched the subject. “I saw a few of your highlight reels from the Games. You’re not bad.”
Good to know that twelve years of practice got him a compliment like that. “Thanks,” he said dryly. “I try my best.”
If you were to take him up on his offer—which you weren’t even sure you would just yet, it was just a silly, fleeting thought—you were, in essence, rolling a dice you had no idea even had numbers on. It would be a shot in the dark, a complete leap of faith towards someone you’d met once and were sure you held a great amount of contempt for.
But then, how would you know if the outcome would be bad? In short, you wouldn’t. You had just as much of a chance of learning something meaningful from him than you did wasting your time on him and vice versa. Like he’d said, it wouldn’t be important to him, but it could be important to you.
“The only thing is,” you started, grabbing his attention, “you’re like an elephant on the ice.”
James made a noise in the back of his throat, the crassness of your comment catching him off-guard. “Excuse me?”
“You don’t have any tact when you skate,” you pressed, “especially in handling the puck. It’s like you’ve got cement for hands.”
“What would you know about ice hockey?” he asked, snippy.
“As much as you’d know about figure skating,” you said.
He froze, mouth clamped shut in shock.
And checkmate.
You narrowed your eyes, watching him carefully. To an outsider it would’ve looked like a glance with reservations and its own opinions; maybe even to you. But what it really was was a look of assessment, a look that acted as the buffer between your thoughts and the answer they’d give you, the answer you’d soon give James.
“James is a pretty weird name for a Taiwanese kid,” you said. Half and half the truth and a fabrication, really. Most Taiwanese children answered to their Mandarin names, while some went on to choose English names as they expanded their professional horizons. “Is it your real name, or a Hong Kong thing?”
He didn’t answer your question, not fully. “My friends call me Yufan. Everyone else calls me James.”
“And what can I call you?” you asked.
“It depends. What would you like to call me?”
The statement in and of itself didn’t betray any deeper meaning, though you knew what he meant. Would you keep your distance from him, tell him that you didn’t need his help, remain professional, or would you say yes, accept his help, and become his mentee—even more, perhaps even his friend.
Maybe he’s lonely, you thought. Lonely and clueless on how to ask someone to be his friend. Or maybe he was just some prick on a power trip trying to make you feel bad about your skills.
You wouldn’t know unless you took a chance on him.
“Alright, how about this.” You clasped your hands together, earnest. “You give me pointers on how to improve my figure skating, and I’ll help you become better at ice hockey. It only seems fair,” you added as he went to protest, “since we’d only be assisting each other in specific elements. You good with that?”
He seemed to mull over your proposal, though he seemed unhappy to learn that you were not impressed with his own skill. “Fine,” he said begrudgingly. He stuck out his hand for you to shake, wriggling his lean, ringed fingers. “Training buddies?”
You took it, your palm cold against his warm skin. “Training buddies.”
Before you knew it, weeks had passed.
James became a regular feature in your life since he’d rather rudely inserted himself into it, squeezing himself in between your Tuesday cram school and your Thursday solo training. He always arrived with a smile on his face, though the contents of it always differed; some days he was smug, impatiently tapping your legs as he waited for you to get a manoeuvre right; other days he was soft, assuring you that not having the strength you needed to do a certain drill wasn’t the end of the world, even when you acted like it was.
Similarly, you’d been able to whip him into shape with the mindset of a ballet teacher in skates, stern and precise and never in the mood for the endless nonsense he dished out. You balanced each other’s energy like that. Where you were rigid schedules and languid, flowing movements, James was pure, unfiltered bursts of creativity and crashes into barriers. He showed you how to colour outside the lines, and you taught him how to outline the sketches he needed to play.
But before all that happened, more than a few things went wrong.
Before you learnt how to trust him, you’d hit him over the head with his own hockey stick.
The air was tense, alight with the anger and frustration you shared. James glared at you with the fire of a thousand suns burning in his eyes, jaw set in a scowl that made your blood curdle. “You’re a little brat, you know that? A brat who refuses to cooperate the moment she has to do something she doesn’t want to—”
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that,” you snapped.
“I’ll talk to you however I want,” he shot back. “As long as you keep being useless—”
Right, said the reasonable part of your brain. Enough is enough. So, in a split-second decision, you grabbed the stick he’d been holding—the old but sturdy taped-up contraption he’d been using to correct your posture that didn’t need correcting—and reared your arms back, coming down hard on his back as he ducked for safety.
You didn’t hurt him that badly, you could see afterwards. But he made sure to milk the shit out of your sympathy once you realised what you’d done.
Before he learnt how to take you seriously, he told you stipid things like,
“You know, you shouldn’t act so haughty all the time. You and I both learnt the same things in beginners skating lessons.” He glanced you up and down in a way that you weren’t sure if it was judgemental or merely observant. “You’re not teaching me anything new, here.”
You paused, your arms still braced in the elegant position you’d been in to demonstrate the gentler movements that would help him during matches. You placed your hands on your hips in a very unladylike fashion, scowling. “Last I checked, I’m not a beginner figure skater, and last I checked, I don’t constantly injure myself because of my poor form.”
He scoffed. “Pfft—okay, my form is not that bad—”
“You skate like a fucking pensioner.”
“—defence players are literally the best skaters on the ice. And we play two different sports! You can’t compare the styles of the two.”
You raised a brow. “I thought you just said we learnt the same basics.”
He froze. “Shit, yeah. Okay. That— that was on me, this time.”
Before you learnt to work together like a well-oiled machine, you’d bruised yourselves bumping heads like bulls.
“If you think, for even one second, I’m going to skate laps around this rink while you sit on your ass and time me, you’ve got another thing coming.”
“And if you think I’m just going to stand here and argue with you all afternoon instead of getting shit done, you’ve got an even bigger thing coming. Put on your skates.”
You threw him a filthy look, still stubbornly in your worn trainers. “Make me, princess.”
“I’ll make you eat your hands, is what I’ll make you do,” he replied, pressing his index finger halfway to your face.
However, after several gruelling hours and unproductive days, you realised that it was in both your best interests to simply pretend like you got along. And it worked.
You watched with bated breath as James glided across the ice, parroting the moves you’d shown him earlier. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, turn, and repeat. Since you’d given him your begrudging, hard-handed guidance, he’d become more graceful in his skating, more careful in his movements. He no longer moved with the tact of a baby elephant, and he’d even gotten better at handling his puck, though you had nothing in particular to do with that.
James looked back at you from over his shoulder, eyes expectant and awaiting your praise. “How’s this? Am I doing it?”
Manoeuvring your soft expression into a manner of nonchalance, you leaned your arms against the barrier, shrugging your shoulders. Your leg raised behind you in a subconscious movement, a stretching exercise Peiling had drilled into you so effectively that you did it without thinking. “You’re getting there,” you admitted, watching as he perfected the exercises you’d told him to work on in his downtime.
James’ face fell to an unimpressed scowl at the impartial remark, but he could easily fool himself into thinking he saw, if just for a moment, a glimmer of pride in your eyes when he first turned to you. It was a quick, fleeting look you’d given him when you thought he couldn’t see, but he caught on. He always did. After all, he was a defenceman. He needed to keep a keen eye.
And before you fell apart, Chao Yufan showed you a part of him that he hadn’t shown anyone else.
“You know, it’s kind of difficult to believe you don’t like Yufan.”
Those were the first words that your senior and longtime comrade spoke to you since returning from a training camp in China.
Lin Shihan was one of the most renowned Taiwanese figure skaters in the world of winter sports, Peiling’s first prodigy and, most importantly, the girl you’d been calling ‘big sister’ for as long as you could remember. She entered the rink with a look on her face, because that seemed to be the way everyone you knew was greeting you these days, and crossed her arms over her chest. She was dressed in her civvies, a stark contrast to your fitted black training gear—tights, skirt, top, leg warmers and all—her hair done up in its usual tight bun.
She’d met James in passing a few times, even though their schedules almost never overlapped. The interactions had been friendly enough, from what you could deduct. All you knew she thought of him was that he had too much attitude and that she refused to call him James on account of being older than him. Not that she had any knowledge of your dynamic, much less persuasions or opinions of it.
You turned to her with wide eyes, because you were used to her greeting you with a little more than a wild accusation that you liked your training buddy. Usually she gave you a, “Hey, how was your week?” Sometimes you were even lucky enough to get, “I missed you while I was gone.” Not today, it seemed.
“What… is that supposed to mean?” you asked dumbly.
“Oh, don’t play dumb with me,” she scoffed, motioning for you to skate closer. You did, stopping only a few centimetres short of where she stood, leaning your elbows against the barrier as you came closer for some serious girl talk, because that’s what her expression told you you were in for. She quirked a brow, as if challenging you to tell her differently from what she believed. “I’ve seen you two training together. You’re soooo yunlan.”
“Nuh-uh,” you scoffed petulantly. “Am not.”
“He definitely likes you,” she added quickly. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately, for her—you caught it. Her brown eyes shifted from somewhere in the middle distance to you, like she was trying to be nonchalant and failing on purpose, like people do in the movies when they want someone to realise something. And you did.
You gasped. “He does not!”
“Say what you want,” she sang, “but the proof is all there.”
“He literally hates me,” you said, perhaps a bit dramatically. “We only train together because we need each other’s help, you know that. Outside of that, we practically never talk. And he’s always so rude to me! Remember that time he wanted to trip me just because he felt like it? That’s so not yunlan behaviour.”
She shrugged. “He’s pulling on your pigtails.”
You pointed an accusatory finger in her face. “You do not exist to plant doubt about my training buddy in my brain, okay? That is not your purpose in the plot.”
“I kind of do,” she said. “Isn’t that what big sisters are for? Making you doubt yourself? No,” she corrected herself, tilting her head. “That’s what coaches are for.” She turned back to you, smug. “I’m just here to annoy you.”
“Why are you even here to talk about James?” you whined. “You just came back from Harbin, and the first thing you do instead of telling me about the competition is tease me about a crush I don’t have.”
She sighed, rolling her eyes like you asking about her trip was the last thing she wanted to talk about. “Fine. What do you want to know about the trip? I went, I won. I remain the undefeated champion in Asia for women’s singles in the senior division.”
“Well… what was your hotel like?” you enquired innocently.
“Big.”
“And Harbin? What’s it like this time of year?” you tried again.
“Cold.”
You threw up your hands in a hopeless gesture. “You’re doing that on purpose!” you accused. “You’re trying to make me less interested in Harbin so you can bother me about my nonexistent crush on James. And don’t say it’s not nonexistent,” you said, catching her look. “Because it’s not. Not nonexistent. It’s not— it doesn’t exist.”
“Ugh, why are you so opposed to a little romance?” she asked. “You’re a teenager. Shouldn’t you be all over a cute older guy like him?”
“I’m not opposed to it,” you said. “It’s just not the most important thing to me right now.”
“And, what? Skating is?” Shihan shook her head. “You can’t live your whole life like that.”
An uncharacteristically solemn silence followed.
You deflated, your posture growing sloppy where it once had been stilted, standing at attention. Her statement hung in the air, blunt and unsoftened by a joke or jest as it usually would’ve been. The air was cold, more so than before, and you felt the tips of your fingers beginning to numb.
You knew she was right. She hadn’t even affirmed her position outright; all she’d done was ask you a question and tell you that you couldn’t live your life a certain way. But you knew well enough what she meant—your whole life, short-lived as it had been until that point, could not revolve around one thing and one thing only. You were a teenager with all the time and opportunity in the world. Why didn’t you take a break every now and then?
You knew, and so did Shihan, that there was no such thing as a break when it came to this sport. Figure skaters started young, competed young, dominated young, and spent the rest of their lives either still competing or training other young ones. You started when you were five, competed from the age of ten, dominated from thirteen up until now, and would probably spend the rest of your life doing the same.
You couldn’t—wouldn’t—start resting, kicking back, enjoying life now. Or ever, for that matter. You weren’t destined for a life of joy and relaxation. You were destined for greatness. And that came at the price of your childhood; a price you were already paying; a price you wouldn’t stop paying until you were standing on that first place podium at the Winter Olympics. Who cares what you wanted out of life? It wasn’t about you, or being yourself, but what you owed to everyone who helped you in getting to where you were now; too far along to be able to give up, too privileged to be able to complain about something as small as freedom.
“I know you think so,” you said, and she took careful note of your word choice. Then, mustering up a small smile, you added, “I’ll try to have some fun this year. How’s that sound?”
Good enough for me, her expression seemed to say. Keenly looking into your doleful eyes, your empty smile. You tried. You really did. You tried to be positive for her. But she knew, she’d been where you were. She was where you were. There was no positivity for anyone or anything that did not get you to where you needed to be, which was in first place. You wouldn’t let anything get in your way. Not friends, not family, not cram school, and certainly not a boy.
Though, in hindsight, you didn’t much mind letting James get in your way, did you?
The city of Taipei was busiest at night, when the streets were filled with people and the night sky was lit up by street lamps and neon signs. Marketplaces were especially crowded, with tourists and locals alike bumping elbows to try and get to their favourite stalls, nainais and ahyis yelling to be heard over the hustle and bustle of the vendors. You steered James through the teeming streets, his bigger hand fitting snugly in yours as you tried to locate the stall you’d been telling him about all week. You moved with the purpose of a girl on a mission, ready to prove yourself correct.
It all started one afternoon after training, when Peiling and James’ coach, Chen Yuhsuan—a man in his forties who seemed to have an oddly extensive, tense history with your own coach—had let you go for the day and you were left to your own devices. It had become something of a routine for the two of you to get lunch together, at a small place just a hop, skip and a jump away from the train station you parted ways at in the evenings, when it was high time for you to return home. You’d been sitting across from him at your usual table, a low, rickety wooden thing that cramped your legs together, making your knees knock each other’s, when James had casually mentioned being a street food connoisseur, and that, in his highest opinion, you were wrong about which street food was the best.
“I’m sorry?” you’d said, pitch picking up at the end as an indication of incredulous question. “What do you mean gua bao isn’t the reigning champ of Asian street food?”
“I mean just that,” he replied, taking a nonchalant spoonful of his congee. “Pad kee mao is undoubtedly the best of the best. You’ll never get anything better, like—” he shrugged, as if the truth were out of his hands— “anywhere.”
“Okay, that… is just objectively wrong,” you said. “Gua bao is a classic that no food in the world can compare to. That’s just a fact.”
He pouted, as if sympathetic. “I can’t blame you for thinking that way. Taiwan doesn’t have the best Thai cuisine, so you’ve probably never tasted pad kee mao in its native excellence. You’ve only got a limited scope of the best food in the world.”
You scowled, jabbing your chopsticks threateningly in his direction. “Don’t speak so definitively, prettyboy. Soon enough, you’ll be proven wrong.”
He raised a singular, dark brow. “Oh, yeah? How so?”
“I’ll take you to the best gua bao spot in Taiwan,” you promised. “Next week, after practice, at this night market by the station.”
He leaned back in his seat, the tips of his fingers playing with the rim of his glass, the plum-coloured and flavoured drink casting a pinkish glow over his hand, smiling in amusement. “…Fine. It’s a date.”
You’d balked. “It is?”
He tilted his head. “If you’d like for it to be.”
Which brought you here, a week later, on your not-a-date date, ready to prove him wrong and change his perspective on the world and food as he knew it.
You found the stall easily enough, if not for its bright lighting and in-your-face advertising, then certainly for the heavenly smell of braised pork belly and fluffy white steamed bread. You let go of James’ hand, showing it off with a flourish and a tada~! he seemed to find adorable. He glanced blankly up at the sign, the warm lights from the overhead lanterns casting a white glow over his glasses, like a character from those mangas he read religiously.
He didn’t say anything as you ordered two of your usual, the classic, the timeless, the unforgettable gua bao as made by Nainai Chen, who’d been making them the same way since before either of you were born. You waited with thinly-veiled anticipation threatening to spill over at even the slightest indication from James’ side that he was anything other than neutral towards what was happening in front of him. A small part of you hoped he knew you’d never done something like this for anyone before. Taken someone out to one of your favourite stalls, the place you kept hidden away from everyone you knew for fear that they would make it their own place.
Yeah. You gatekept your favourite things. So what?
A bigger, more rational part of you knew he probably just thought of this as a friendly outing. A platonic hangout with his younger friend whom he terrorised sometimes. He’d joked about it being a date, but, of course, that’s all it had been—a joke. James Chao was a professional joker, no one to take seriously. Sure, he made jokes, and sure, he was handsome in his own unique way… with nice hair, and tanned skin, and plump lips that were accentuated out by his adorable yet very faint overbite. Why were you thinking of him romantically, again? You weren’t. Didn’t. You didn’t.
Once she finished wrapping up your food, you gave Nainai Chen a grateful bow, paying her several dollars more than you were supposed to, like you always did. She’d learnt to stop refusing your extra money, merely taking it with a kind smile on her weathered face.
You turned to James with your hand already outstretched. He accepted his bao, and you waited in trembling anticipation for his final verdict as he took his first bite. And then his second. And his third. And his—
You threw up your hands, starting, “Oh, come on—!”
“It’s good,” he nodded, chewing thoughtfully. Then, noticing your look, he grinned. “Still not better than pad kee mao, though.”
You deadpanned. “You’re kidding.”
“I maintain that you just haven’t had good drunken noodles yet,” James asserted, while you took an angry bite of your gua bao. “I’ll take you for some proper ones sometime. Promise.”
“Thought you said Taiwan doesn’t do Thai cuisine justice,” you pointed out. “You gonna book us tickets to Bangkok after playoffs, or something?”
“I actually know someone who makes pretty good pad kee mao in Taipei,” he said. He glanced at you, catching onto your questioning look, and said simply, “Mama Chao.”
Your eyes widened. “Your mom?”
“Yep. She’s no chef, but you wouldn’t know that if you only knew her from her cooking. She makes some of the best noodles this side of the world,” he boasted, while you were still trying to process the fact that he wanted you to meet his mother and, by extension, his father, as well.
Meeting the parents had never been such a big deal between friends, so the fact that you were freaking out was perhaps a bit dramatic. But it was different for pairings like you and James. Girls and boys. Even if you were friends, strictly and only ever friends, there’d still always be that added element your biological differences brought to the equation. People still expected most friendships like yours to end in romance, especially parents. What would they think when James brought you home, the girl he’d been training with since November? And for dinner, no less?
He didn’t mention his mother again that night. Not after you drifted from Nainai Chen’s legendary gu bao stall, nor when you walked further into the marketplace in search of something sweet. Not after you’d given up halfway through your mission and opted for convenience store ice cream, nor when you took a seat at a bus stop situated under the stars.
He did say something else, though. When you were halfway through your caramel-flavoured treat, your lips swollen from the chill and covered in sugar, his voice, softer than usual, rang through the air like church bells.
“Why did you agree to be my training buddy?”
You turned to him. You’d been waiting for the moment he’d ask that inevitable question, for the day those words left his plush lips.
“Hockey players always have something to learn from you guys,” he continued, “but figure skaters… you were already talented enough. So why did you even… I don’t know. Why’d you even give me the time of day?”
You squinted up at the moon, bright and pale and silently basking in its glow. “Why did you ask me if you could give me pointers?”
“Honest?” You nodded, and he said, “Because I didn’t know how else to catch or keep your attention.” His eyes flicked to yours, and briefly, swept over your lips. “I dunno if you’ve noticed, but I’m pretty bad at making friends.”
You smiled softly, exhaling through your nose. Not a laugh, not nothing. “Honest?” He nodded, and you said, “Because I wasn’t sure of myself. I mean, I know it sounds stupid. A figure skater not being confident in herself. Crazy, right?”
“Not crazy,” he said softly. “Stupid, maybe. But not crazy.”
You sighed. “Yeah, well.” A grin picked at your mouth. “I know how to do everything. I know how to throw my weight around and to twirl seventy times without puking. But after a while, doing the same routine— the same moves, to the same music, in the same glittery tutu… it gets old, and I lose myself a little bit. When you came around, I’d been in a slump for months. I was consistently placing second in all my competitions, and nothing I did could fix it.”
You remembered when you’d first told Peiling about your plan, she took it surprisingly well. In fact, she—and don’t fall out of your chair when I say this—agreed with what you suggested.
You’d been standing across from her on the ice before one of your usual training sessions, hands floating through the air as you gesticulated, when she nodded in understanding. “Cross-training isn’t too out of the ordinary,” she mentioned, laying a thoughtful hand on her hip. “It’s usually hockey players that train like figure skaters to improve their skating skills, but it’s not unheard of to go the other way around. I didn’t suggest it to you because you’d been performing perfectly until now. Though after Beijing…”
She tilted her head, her face already telling you before she even needed to say a word.
Coming in second wasn’t bad in itself. Silvers were better than nothing in any sport. However, when you went from winning gold at every competition to consistently placing second as you supposedly progressed, well, that was a different story altogether. You knew you were gold medal material; you knew you had the makings of a star in you. That’s what made your silver medals so humiliating. You were so close, you came so close, to winning every competition you qualified for, but you lacked that little bit that separated you from proper winners.
And you couldn’t have that, not for one second.
You tried to ignore the sinking feeling in your gut at her words, wringing your hands in anticipation. “So… would it be possible for us to train together?”
Her face softened. “Of course. We’ll just need to get his coach’s contact details, and set up a training schedule that doesn’t interfere with either of your plans during the week. After that, we can get down to the specifics of what you need to improve on, and what he can learn from you.”
“I didn’t need to improve,” you said. “But I needed inspiration again. And you…”
“I’d suggest that we switch out Tchaikovsky for some Arctic Monkeys, maybe?”
“Mm. How about you try that one combination… the spinny one and the one that has something to do with toes? Like you did that other time.”
“Let’s just throw shit around and see what sticks, okay?”
You chuckled. “You helped a lot.”
“Oh, yeah?” Yufan grinned. “I’m an inspiration to you, huh?”
“Shut up,” you murmured, shoving his shoulder. But you didn’t say no.
The sound of your skates gliding against the ice filled the air as you and Yufan did a few laps around the rink, legs moving languidly behind you, your gaze trained over your shoulder to see where you were going.
“Remember to keep those knees bent!” you called, turning to look in front of you where Yufan was very earnestly focusing on your command, easily dropping lower on his knees, switching more weight onto the outer edges of his skates as you rounded a corner.
“You know, I find it very interesting how, in the three weeks we’ve trained together, you haven’t once picked up a hockey stick,” he said. “Except for that time you hit me with one.”
You squeezed your eyes shut, running a hand over your warming face. “I told you I was sorry about that.”
“I deserved it,” he conceded. “But that’s not my point. I’ve been learning all these fancy figure skating moves—and for a good reason, of course… I just— I’d like to… I dunno.” He sped up, inner edges taking the brunt of the acceleration. “I’d like to maybe, if you’d like, teach you sometime.”
You smiled as he stuttered his way through the proposal. “What, to play ice hockey?”
“Or roller hockey,” he added, shrugging. “Whichever one you’re more interested in.”
“I’m not really interested in either of them, if I’m gonna be honest with you,” you said. “The idea of me playing hockey sounds terrifying. I’d, like, take someone’s eye out.”
“It would probably be mine,” Yufan said. “And I wouldn’t be opposed to that. It gets me one step closer to my true dream: being a pirate.”
You shook your head, fitting in a quick toe loop before gliding to a halt. “You’ve got your heart set on this, don’t you?”
He stopped in front of you, only a metre and a bit between your bodies. “As a matter of fact, I do, yeah.”
Ever since that night at the marketplace, Yufan had been acting differently. Not oddly, per se—or, perhaps, any more odd than he did usually—but not close to normal, either. He’d been friendlier, softer, uncharacteristically gentle towards you. He gave you nothing but encouraging smiles and sure words, it almost made you suspicious. And, God, the way he looked at you… with such tenderness, with affection so unlike him. It made your knees weak in all the best and worst ways.
You narrowed your eyes then, your suspicion finally reaching its boiling point when he gave you another one of those damn smiles. “Okay, what is it with you, these days? You’re all cheesy, and now you’re suddenly asking me if I want to learn hockey from you? What’s wrong? Are you dying, or something?”
He scoffed. “No. I— I just…” Hanging his head, he gave a tiny, adorable sigh. “Can’t a guy ask a pretty girl out?”
“Well, yeah, but— wait, what?”
“You heard me.”
You stared at him. Hard and long. “Yeah, I did. Clear as damn day. What I’m asking is, like— are you sure? Are you sure you have the right girl?”
He tapped his chin, his gaze turning heavenwards as he pretended to think. All the while, he floated closer to you, his warmth entering your sphere. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I do.”
“You… want to take me out,” you said.
“That’s the gist of it, yeah,” he replied.
“Is that allowed?”
He snorted. “What?”
“Like— I don’t know.” You made a vague shape in the air with your free hand, the other coming up to press against your hip, the aching joint throbbing beneath your palm. “I just— I don’t know! You’re asking me out and you’re standing right there and you’re, like, really pretty and you’re making me nervous!”
He frowned. “Sorry,” he apologised, though you could see the faintest hint of a smile creeping through his expression. “I mean, it’s a pretty easy question to answer. Just— say yes or no.”
You glanced at him, and for a moment, caught in his expression the slightest bit of hesitation. That’s when you realised this was as much of a risk for him as it was a surprise for you. And that made deciding just a little bit easier.
“I, um… I’d love to play out hockey with you.” Your eyes widened. “I— What I mean to say is that I’d love to take you out for hockey. Or you— I’d love for you to take me out to play hockey… Jeez! Sorry. I don’t know what happened there.”
That got a laugh out of him, breaking the bright beam he’d worn the entire time you stuttered through your acceptance. “It’s fine. I understood you the first time.”
You smiled breathlessly.
And that was all Yufan needed.
You didn’t play hockey for your first date. Or your second. Or third, or… any of them. In fact, you didn’t even near the ice until you became familiar enough with one another to know your something unnamed had become something quietly expected. Something implied.
He promised to take it slow with you, not only because neither of you had ever been in a relationship before, but because you had so many external engagements that, well, proper dating wasn’t exactly an option just yet. One of these many engagements, of course, was game season.
Out of all the winter sports, ice hockey was reputed as being one of the most invigorating amongst athletes, and once you started going to Yufan’s games, you understood why. The rink was cold, filled to the brim with people sitting in the stands, cheering as the players swept across the ice, blurs of blue and red and black and yellow. The air was alight with the glimmering of ice shavings from how quickly the players raced over the ice, like glitter under the harsh lights.
You sat back in your uncomfortable plastic seat, knees to your chest as you watched with a keen eye what occurred only a few metres below you. Yufan rushed along the ice, no more than a smudge of colour. Yet you spotted him as if it were second nature, eyes catching onto the bright lettering on the back of his jersey. Taipei Polar Bears. Number 16.
Despite having played it a few times, you weren’t one hundred percent sure how ice hockey worked. Or, honestly, even ten percent. Zero would be the closest estimate, in this scenario. Your eyes flicked continuously from the rink to your phone screen, which was open on a Wikipedia page on the rules and play-by-play of ice hockey, for whenever the announcers spewed some nonsense over the intercom like,
“Our local Taipei Polar Bears are far behind at only three points midway, while Les Champions de Marseille stay true to their names and dominate with double that.”
I won’t go too in-depth into what happened in the game, not only because you weren’t a hockey player and therefore had no idea what was going on, but because I, the author, have even less idea of what was going on.
Long story short, things happened, good and bad. Yufan whizzed past other players, stole the puck from them, did everything in his power to stop the other team from scoring. From what you heard, defencemen could have either constant or nonexistent contribution to scoring; Yufan seemed to be somewhere in the middle, switching between offensive and defensive play dependent on what he deemed necessary in that particular moment. All you could do was watch, perhaps with small hearts thumping where your irises would’ve been, perhaps not.
Players pushed each other into the barrier, the audience yelled obscenities, and so went the spirit of ice hockey. For all your lack of knowledge on the game, you could feel that there was an undeniable tension in the air. The team’s captain and Coach Chen seemed to be butting heads every other intermission, while things escalated between the two teams. The French skaters seemed to think significantly less of the Polar Bears, and it was clear in how they spoke of them to the referee. Every now and then they’d skate over to the short, weathered man, and rapid fire what looked to be enraged French when a mistake had been made on the referee’s side. Even the translator didn’t look happy.
If this game had a soundtrack, the song to set the scene playing out in front of you probably would’ve been something off of Verdi’s Requiem. Skaters yelling expletives at one another, pushing each other against the barriers, blood spattering the ice as those with authority tried to keep things civil to no avail. Pucks being chucked from one end of the ice to the other, sticks breaking, skates skidding.
Two of the Polar Bears’ forwards had turned to one another, yelling something about the centre focusing too much on flair and too little on actual play, exchanging curses back and forth in Mandarin and Hokkien. Yufan stood between them, hands braced on both of their chests, holding them apart with growing annoyance. He said something, the words too soft to travel across the ice and through the chaos, but they didn’t let up in their argument, skating away while pointing fingers at one another.
You’d asked Peiling what to expect of a game of ice hockey, and she’d told you to prepare yourself for anything. You wondered how she knew, why her eyes became misty when she said, “All I can tell you from the hockey games I’ve been to…” Regardless of her past with the sport, she was right. You had to prepare yourself for anything. The only downside?
You hadn’t.
You sucked in a sharp breath as the intermission was over, and the game was on again. Something about sitting there in the stands, surrounded by strangers who shared your interest and perhaps misguided passion in ice hockey—it invigorated you. And something about watching Yufan as he rushed across the ice, skating with the finesse of a professional dancer, made your heart thump harder than you thought possible.
After the game, you found Yufan at the entrance of the teams’ locker rooms, sweaty and breathless and starry-eyed like no other. You caught each other’s eyes across the hall, people passing by you in a haze, and you asked a silent question. Shall we? And he nodded without hesitation.
One of your many after-game rituals was going out for hotpot at one of your regular spots. No parents, no friends, no teammates. Just the two of you. It was something that had begun as a way to connect when you started training together, and it had just stuck and stayed strong till now. He sat across from you in the crowded restaurant, fingers deftly clasped around his chopsticks as he ate. He said nothing; you knew he wouldn’t, not for the first few minutes. It always took him a moment to regain his breath, get his brain out of the game and back to you.
“You did well out there,” you spoke into the silence, over the sound of the bubbling soup between you.
He glanced at you, hooded eyes clear in their question, in their understanding. “Even when we lost six-four?”
You shrugged. “I don’t care about any of that. All I care about is how good you did for yourself in the game, and… you did.”
A nod from his side, eyes set in a pensive stare. He’d confided in you before that this particular season had been hard on the team, what with all their consistent losses and all the fights that broke out amongst them. You thought, maybe, that he was in a similar position to you a few months ago. Coming so close to victory, the tips of your fingers brushing a gold trophy, and making it just not far enough.
It affected him; at the very least, his morale when playing. And you, noticing as you did everything, tried to lighten up the mood whenever he started brooding.
“And don’t call me ‘Ice Queen’. It’s stupid.”
Yufan smiled. “Nice to know you see my solo potential in a team sport.” He adjusted his posture, sitting further back in his chair. “What else am I supposed to call you, then? Would you like to be demoted to ‘Ice Princess’?”
You scoffed softly. “I’d just like it if you called me something normal guys called their…” You paused, because your words had, for lack of a better term, utterly failed you. What were you? Were you boyfriend and girlfriend? Were you training buddies who went on dates? Were you too young to try and label whatever romantically-charged relationship you had with a boy who was how many years your senior?
He quirked a brow. “…Girlfriend?” he wondered gently, doing nothing to hide his amusement at your hesitation. “You seem like you’d be my girlfriend by now.”
You tilted your head. “Oh, yeah?”
“Uh-huh. I don’t go on dates with just anyone.”
You pretended to give the statement an ounce of thought, when in reality, you’d be thinking about those nine words for years to come. “Well, then, what would you call your girlfriend?”
He mimicked your expression, cocking his head to the side as if in thought. “Lots of things. Pretty girl, for one. Babe. Stupid… Ice Queen.”
“No fair! You’re not allowed to reuse shit ones just ‘cause you think it’s funny to make me mad!”
He laughed this time, loud and true, the sound bursting through the thick air that hung between you. It was a nice thing to hear; a rare thing to witness. Chao Yufan was not someone who laughed easily—he was too serious for that. Or so he would like to have you believe. You knew, though. You felt it. There was something in you that told you he was happier than he let on.
You didn’t know then not to trust that fickle, unreliable something.
Yufan was three things when he was in love.
First, he was gentle. All soft smiles and laughs you could barely hear over the chatter of whatever place you’d found yourselves in. He placed loving hands on your face when he squeezed your cheeks between his fingers, murmuring something about how you looked like a flower, in that voice reserved for you, and only you.
He still teased you, of course. That seemed to be something he would never be able to let up. His childishness; his mischievous nature. It was unrelenting in its intensity and recurrence, neverending tongue-in-cheek comments meant anywhere between endearing and straight up mocking.
One afternoon, you’d been sitting together on the pavement outside his family home, arms tucked under your legs as you waited for either one of you to gain the confidence to say it was time for you to go home. Time for you to part, time for you to say goodbye, to say, “Until next time.”
The sun had already begun to set, sunk below the high rises and apartment buildings dotting the city, yet the air was alight with activity, with sound, with sights. It was as if Taipei itself was telling you, Not yet. Taunting, Look, I’m still awake. What reason is there for you to leave now?
Yufan looked at you, if he hadn’t already been looking. You sat next to him, eyes fixed on something in front of you, something he couldn’t see, bathed in the glow of the setting sun. Hues of purple and pink and orange and red covered the patchy, imperfect surface of your skin, your silver jewellery glinting like stars next to your full cheeks. You were so pretty, like something straight out of an old film. That, he decided, was a face worth pining for. And he did, quietly, whenever you weren’t looking, weren’t listening as intently as you always did. Weren’t ready to ruin the moment with your stupid humour, your unnecessary little quips.
Like now, when you noticed him staring, and a wide, shit-eating grin spread across your plump lips. “What’re you looking at?” you asked, accent exaggerated like those cute girls in dramas from the Mainland.
He rolled his eyes, because he’d been caught out. Again. Said, “Not you, that’s for sure,” because he had no other appropriate response. Because he was a teenager who wasn’t used to the feelings swirling in his heart at that moment, and being cruel is easier than being honest.
You stuck your tongue out at him, blowing a raspberry while your eyes screwed shut. “Boo, you ass.”
He mimicked your expression, giving you a light shove with his weaker hand. The one that wouldn’t be able to pack as much of a punch as it usually would’ve, because he’d hurt it trying to show you a cool trick with his hockey stick earlier. “You’re so much prettier when you shut that big mouth of yours.”
And you smiled, because you knew, or you thought, beneath all those layers of defensiveness and snippy jokes, Yufan really did like you. After all, what else would he keep you around for?
Second, he was reverent. Not a day went by where he didn’t admire your skill, or your tact, or your beauty, or that little scar you had on your cheek from when you fell on your face as a toddler, and didn’t make it completely obvious to everyone around him. As a rising star in the sports world, he was meant to keep his personal life secret, yet when it came to you, he couldn’t be bothered to hide what people insisted needed to be hidden.
Whenever you completed a trick, a well-placed Axel or something close to it, he’d skate over to you with his mouth hanging open in exaggerated awe; whenever you were walking next to him and he got a glimpse of you standing in a certain light, the shadows and contours of your body displayed just right; whenever you helped him with his stupid twelfth grade homework, explained functions to him like you were the older one—scenes and moments where all he could really do was lean back, drink you in, and say, “You’re amazing.”
Like when he tried to teach you how to play hockey on ice, and you skated circles around him. Granted, he was going easier on you than he would normal beginners, but you still played like you’d been in the game longer than him.
The rink was dark, only the harsh glow from the overhead lights rendering you sight. Music drifted from the speakers, something you’d picked out, or perhaps something you’d forced Yufan to listen to that he just got used to and started loving the way he loved you. Steadily, patiently, neverendingly. You swept past him, holding his stick—his newest one, the one that he hadn’t had to tape back together for this game, like the one he was playing with—in your hands as you dealt with the puck, shuffling it over the icy surface beneath your feet with grace, speed that he assumed came from your many years of training.
“Aaannnddd here she comes, the Polar Bears’ newest addition, sweeping the opposition off their feet with her mad skills!” you narrated, head down, trained on the puck. “She crosses over the, uh… the blue line, and passes by the opposing team’s very handsome defencemen before she comes to the goal to shoot—” you reared your stick back, the flat coming down to strike the puck straight into the open, unattended goal— “and score!”
Yufan watched as you skated around the rink, pumping your fists in the air and whisper-shouting praises to yourself, playing as the crowd, with sound effects and all. If, like the cartoons, there could’ve been hearts in his eyes, there would’ve been. “You’re doing so well, pretty girl,” he praised. “You’re basically a pro already.”
“I know that’s right,” you gloated, trying—and failing—to do a dorky little victory dance that made you look incredibly stupid. Really, genuinely like an idiot.
And Yufan loved every second of it.
Third, he was kind. Not just to you, or to his friends, but to everyone he felt, and even didn’t feel, deserved it. His family—the Chaos—were all kind, inviting people, enough so that you could pinpoint exactly where Yufan had gotten in from. Kind, in the sense that they were accepting of you, their son’s very different, very eccentric girlfriend. Kind, in the sense that they treated you as though you were one of their own, already married into the family. Kind, in the sense that it made your heart ache to wonder why such a family, such a boy, would ever have to struggle.
He introduced you to his family shortly after officially asking you to be his girlfriend. It was rather in order for him to, given the fact that you’d nearly crossed paths with them at the games of his you’d gone to. Your first meeting had been unexpected, because they’d anticipated for him to bring home a local girl, born and bred in Taipei with her own traditions and opinions to counter their own. What they hadn’t expected was you, just as local, with just as many traditions, but something that bound you to them in a way no one else would truly understand. Your bond, of foreigners who’d found their home, who’d lived their lives in it, yet felt like outsiders, felt like they had more to prove than was truly necessary.
Yufan was a lot like his mom, you realised one night, the first night he’d invited you over for dinner at his house. It was a small, cozy place, really only enough for three people, the architecture reminiscent of old-school Japanese homes with their sliding doors and cool wooden floors. You all sat around the dinner table, plates stacked up with all the different delights Yufan’s parents had made in preparation for your arrival—from his father’s side, dishes like beef brisket noodles, and his mother’s side, dishes like tom yum soup, and her famed pad kee mao.
She was Thai, you’d been told, and spoke with the sweetest accent curling around her words. Don’t be mistaken, she spoke rapid fire Mandarin while conversing with her husband, but there was something undeniably gentle, perhaps hesitant about the way she spoke, the way she enunciated. You wondered if you sounded like that to other people. She insisted that you just call her Mama, because, in her words, “Yufan probably won’t bring home another girl since we already like you so much.” However the comment terrified you, it was just as flattering.
Your boyfriend and his mother shared a sense of humour, loud and obvious where his father preferred to stay silent, and smile in gentle amusement. They spoke a lot—really, you thought that maybe you got in five or so words that night—and never ran out of things to comment on. It was like watching a real-life variety show.
They also shared a temperament, it seemed, their patience something fickle and short that could run out at any moment, and their gentleness neverending, not even when their partners were annoying the living daylights of them. The kind of temperament that had him flicking your temple after you’d said something stupid, that had his mother chiding her husband for his attitude. The kind of temperament that made him help you up from your seat and open doors for you, that had his mother taking her husband’s dishes and calling him handsome out of nowhere. The kind of temperament that made her expose his deepest secrets to you while priding himself on doing the same to you.
“You know, darling,” Mama began, turning to face you, “Yufan told us all about you before you even started dating.”
Your boyfriend’s face dropped, fell slack in shock. Conversely, a smile crept its way onto your face, and you looked at Mama Chao with newfound interest. “Oh, really?” you prompted, wanting nothing than to hear more about it.
She nodded sweetly, though you could see that familiar glimmer of mischief in her eyes, the one you so often saw in Yufan’s. “Oh, yes. I think it was in December, wasn’t it? that he came home with stories about you. I could imagine that he’s been rather taken with you since then.”
Yufan tried, “I wouldn’t exactly say—”
“I would,” his father spoke up, the first thing he’d said in ages. “I could see it in your eyes.”
Yufan, like his family, was kind in love, but incredibly, unrelentingly teasing all the same.
Once the new year rolled around, it was far more difficult to follow Shihan’s well-meaning advice and have fun. Not only because you had newfound obligations to your family, but because you had old obligations to your passion, old obligations that you’d put on the back burner since deciding that having fun was more important than committing to something that had cost your parents a fortune to finance.
Practice would need to become an even more regular feature in your daily life than it already had been. That meant no more cram school, and no more joint training sessions with Yufan. You’d have to commit, mind, body, and soul to this sport, to figure skating, or you’d have lost your window for everything. You’d go to competitions, and dominate as you had before, and that left little to no space for a social life.
When you first told him this, he was disappointed. Predictably so, because no teen boy liked having to spend less time with their girlfriend, especially one as dedicated to you as Yufan was. He didn’t talk to you for a few days following the announcement, but you didn’t really have time to coddle him into forgiving you. It was a harsh thought, but if Yufan wanted to end everything you had over something like this, he could go ahead and do it. You didn’t have time to stop him.
You went on a training camp in China without so much as a goodbye to him while he, similarly, travelled to Hong Kong with his team without looking back. After all, you had more important commitments now. Did this mean you wanted to break up? No. But if he was going to be a child about it, there was no need for you to be your usual understanding self (which has been hiding where, exactly?) and try to make amends.
You lasted precisely five days before you caved and called him. It had been a particularly rough day, with yours and the other skaters’ coaches having been unforgiving in their routines; you’d been up hellish heights in roller skates, done laps upon laps around the facility’s rink, and been pushed onto the ice in soccer cleats for whatever nonsense reason they could give you, probably something to do with strengthening your balance on the ice. Tensions had run high between the local and Taiwanese skaters, with you and your peers choosing to spend your evening hiding away in your shared dorms while the locals went and played a game of hockey in the rink… which was what led you to think of Yufan, and be unable to stop thinking of him until the next thing you knew, you were dialling his number and staring at your own reflection in the outgoing video call.
Yufan lasted approximately five seconds before he caved and answered your call. Like you, he’d been sentenced to two weeks of training hell, the likes of which were incomparable to even the worst torture anyone could survive. Mostly because he didn’t survive; not really, not when every one of his limbs ached and his joints screamed whenever he moved too quickly.
His face appeared on your screen like a blessing from the heavens, and all you could do was stare into his dark brown eyes too embarrassed to say anything. His hair had gotten a bit longer since you’d last seen him, his face a bit more mature. Oh, who were you kidding? He looked exactly the same, you were just being dramatic again. He was still your Yufan, all smooth, tanned skin, and plump, pink lips that you desperately wished you’d could kiss.
When you looked deep into his eyes, looked past the droopy, hooded lids, and the feigned indifference, you could see the same embarrassment you felt. But he still spoke first. “Hi, pretty girl.”
The sound of his voice, light and airy like you hadn’t heard in nearly a week, would’ve made your knees buckle if you hadn’t been sitting cross-legged on your bed, lifted a weight you hadn’t realised was resting on your shoulders until it dissipated. Like tension resolved without words. Like wounds eased with the wind. He still liked you. He still called you his pretty girl. He didn’t hate you.
“Hi, Yufan,” you said. Stupid, stupid you. Could you not come up with something better than that? ‘Hi’?! “How… how’s the training camp been?”
He nodded imperceptibly. “Fine. Or, well— no. Not fine. I hurt myself pretty bad during a scrimmage a while ago. But it’s whatever,” he dismissed. You noticed a bruise on his neck, and on his shoulder, where his loose sleeping shirt exposed the skin. “How’s it been in China?”
“Oh.” You gave him a meek shrug. “Not too bad. There are, um… some political tensions rising, but that’s about it.”
He managed a snicker. “Oh, yeah? The coaches fighting about the same old stuff?”
“Yep.” You smiled softly. Yufan thought you looked really pretty when you did that.
“…I saw you guys at the airport before we left,” he told you, ducking his head to avoid your gaze. His nose scrunched, and he added, “I wanted to say goodbye to you.”
Your face fell. “Oh. I’m— you could’ve, if you really wanted to. I would’ve let you.”
“No, it’s fine,” he assured you. “You needed your time to cool off. It just reminded me a little why I hate airports.”
“You do?” Still?
“Yeah.”
This was a conversation you’d had before, the feeling airports gave you. It first came up while you were laying together on the floor of your bedroom, staring at the glow in the dark stars pressed into the ceiling. You loved airports, because it meant you got to go somewhere new. Got to explore, got to see new places and learn new things. Yufan hated them, because,
“It reminds me that the people I love are leaving,” he said. “That… that I won’t be able to see them until they come back. Like my mom, when she goes to visit family in Thailand and I can’t come along. My dad, when he goes to Hong Kong for business and doesn’t come back for a month.” He paused, then, “Like you, when you go to Beijing or Seoul for competitions and I’m not sure when I’ll see you next.”
You sighed, the action more of a sad, rueful exhale. “Oh, Yufan…”
Another pause. Yufan looked into his phone camera, eyes on you still. You couldn’t detect any malice in his stare. Then, why would there be any? “Listen, pretty… I’m sorry about last week,” his soft voice came over the speaker. “About how I acted. That— it was stupid. I shouldn’t have behaved like that. It’s… your career is important. More important than I am.”
You frowned, your brow creasing as your heart ached. You were young, too young to be having these sorts of conversations. Too young to be talking of careers, of your importance in each other’s lives. You both understood that there was nothing to be done about it, but just for a moment, you had the fleeting thought that it wasn’t fair.
Fair. What an odd word to use, to try and define. Nothing was fair. Ever.
“That’s not true,” you said, “and you know it. I’ll always have time for you.” You wouldn’t. “If I don’t, I’ll make time.” Wrong again.
He smiled gently. “It’s alright, stupid.” It wasn’t. “I know why you need to focus more these days. I can wait.” He couldn’t. “Or, maybe… I could help you out a little?” When you raised a sceptical brow, he eagerly continued, “We don’t do cross-training anymore, which I get, but what if I help you with your routines, and stuff? I could help you practice choreography, and you wouldn’t need to do everything alone. I— the hockey season’s quieting down, anyway, so I’ll have plenty of free time.”
You paused. “You wouldn’t mind doing that for me?”
He rolled his eyes. “Baby, do I ever?”
You found yourself smiling, uncontrollable only in the fact that you physically couldn’t help reacting to his words the way you did. Couldn’t help accepting his proposal, missing the way the light in his eyes dimmed with every word, missing the way his smile seemed pained where yours wasn’t. Missing the way he looked at you, like you were something he’d already lost.
There were many technicalities that came with being a foreign athlete in Taiwan. There were many technicalities that came with being a foreign athlete anywhere, you were sure, but Taiwan was heart-piercingly clear in how it viewed non-natives. Though you could compete on an international scale, you were given a specific category to perform in. You didn’t represent Taiwan. You represented foreigners in Taiwan.
Which, considering the fact that you’d lived there for more than half of your life, considering the fact that you were a Taiwanese citizen, hurt. Especially considering the fact that there was little separating you from your local, same-aged peers besides a name that sounded a bit different, proportions that didn’t fit with what society deemed as appropriate for young girls your age.
It put you at odds with your friends, your fellow athletes; everyone you knew who trained the same way you did, did the same routines, faced the same struggles, but who could confidently say they represented their home country. Could you even say you had one, really, when you felt your birthplace was not yours to claim, and your home country separated you from its locals?
The Taiwan Figure Skating Championships were an annual competition that gathered several up and coming figure skaters to choose the lucky athlete that would represent Taiwan at the World Championships, and other such international competitions. It was an honour to any skater who entered to even make the top three, but that wasn’t what you were aiming for.
You’d entered your name with an intention, not hidden or concealed in any way. You’d filled out the application with confidence, confidence that they’d look at your portfolio, your history, your skill set, and consider you as one of the few options that would be able to compete.
You’d sat at your desk at home, finger hovering over the email you’d received in the hours after you returned from cram school, filled with anticipation and fear and impending regret as you contemplated the results to come.
Did you even open the email? Did you brace yourself, for equal parts victory and failure, or did you just throw your hat in and leave it unopened, convinced you didn’t deserve a spot, anyway?
I mean, think about it this way. You’d been training for Nationals before registrations had even opened. Even before you’d met Yufan in Beijing all those months ago, you’d already choreographed and practiced both your short program and free skate. You’d spent all your time in the off-season following the previous Championships training, and exercising, and choreographing, and slaving away in that dark, lonely rink. All that time would, if you didn’t open the email and face your fate, be wasted.
But all that time would also, if you hadn’t been accepted, be wasted, anyway. So, how exactly were you supposed to choose what to do next?
It seemed you didn’t need to, because one of your parents would. You’d been sitting at your desk, your mother and your stepfather, Chihming, crouching anxiously behind you. Shihan and Peiling were waiting for you over the phone, and Yufan had already sent you his own words of encouragement.
雨 you’re going to do great, pretty girl
i just know it
After five minutes of you deliberating, procrastinating, prolonging—every word that could describe you doing everything in your power to avoid opening the email, the pressure seemed to become too much for Chihming, so he reached forward and took over. Predictably, chaos erupted. Your mother yelled for him to back off, while Peiling and Shihan screamed confused obscenities at the ruckus, and all you could do was smack a hand over your eyes so you wouldn’t have to face the inevitable rejection.
Silence. Then, Chihming tapped you on the shoulder. With great reluctance, you opened your fingers just that little bit to read the opening lines.
Dear athlete, we are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to compete at the—
“Holy crap!” you exclaimed, your voice rising impossibly high.
Your mother, bless her soul, frowned in confusion. “What?”
Chihming pointed frantically at the screen. “Look!”
She deadpanned. “I can’t read that, peh bak.”
“Neither can we!” Peiling and Shihan chimed in.
“I got in,” you said quickly. Then, jumping up from your seat, effectively clearing the space as your mother and stepfather took a careful step back, “I got in! Oh, my GOD, I got in! I’m competing at Nationals! I’m gonna be a star!”
And that’s where things went south.
Yufan was someone who was used to pretending that everything was fine when his life was falling apart. Perhaps it was an unfortunate side effect that came with being an only child to immigrants, always putting on a brave face for your parents in times of trouble, which later became putting on a brave face in front of friends, other family members, teammates, and eventually, your neurotic girlfriend.
You’d been going at it for hours by the time he arrived at the rink to help you, just like he’d promised he would. You, however, were not supposed to have been busy when he came, and yet here you were, spent and not looking like you were going to give up whatever you were trying to perfect very soon. It was something he noticed when you trained together; your obsession with perfection, almost comparable to his.
Your approaches differed in two main ways. Where Yufan became unhealthily devoted to whichever task he’d set out to do, you threw yourself into the process blind, unsure of whether you’d emerge in one piece. Where he was cold and calculated, you were hot and reckless, not stopping until your limbs trembled and you couldn’t see straight. Both of you felt things intensely, but there was something about the way your emotions took hold of you, kept you in a vice, that Yufan couldn’t imagine feeling like that, ever.
From what he’d seen, though, it was your approach that got you places. Your sheer dedication not to routine, but to repetition was something to behold. If you couldn’t do something, you’d do it over and over and over again until the soles of your skates were stained with blood and you had no choice but to take a step back. Between the two of you, you were the one who consistently placed first in your competitions, you were the one who was on her way to Nationals. You weren’t the one who was tied to a shitty team and an even shittier self worth hiding behind layers of sarcasm and feigned charm. You were yourself, through and through.
And he wouldn’t be lying if he said he was a little jealous of it. Of you. Not in a predatory, competitive sense, in a way that meant he wanted exactly what you had, felt entitled to it. No, rather, in a way that had him wishing he had your confidence, your self-assurance in your skill. He didn’t have that, and it showed in his games.
Which is where the saving face came in. He’d come straight from a gruelling practice that had ended in Coach Chen asking him an impossible question, weathered face contorted with something like hopeless rage. Do you even want to be here? When you play like that, who could be able to tell that you’re passionate about all of this, and not just wasting our time?
But that didn’t matter. Not now, anyway, when he had you in front of him. You, his wonderful girlfriend, who was not afraid to get snippy with him, who hugged him whenever he got off the ice after a game, who said he was doing just fine for himself, and that that was all you really cared about. You, his talented girlfriend, who was on her way to Nationals, World Championships, and who knows what else, who was better than he was in any regard, who was leaving him behind in Taiwan to become an international star. Who deserved nothing less from the world.
You didn’t notice him at first, and he wasn’t surprised, with how lost you were in your own dark little world. Music blasted from the speakers—probably something from that one English indie band you never stopped talking about. Peiling was sitting in the stands, eyes narrowed as if in disapproval. Yufan knew her to be quite the strict coach; perhaps not as bad as Coach Chen, but certainly a nightmare in her own right. In her hands she held a clipboard, and when Yufan sat down next to her to pull on his skates, she angled it away from him. Not that he was planning on looking, but now that she’d hidden it, he felt his suspicion growing.
He knew she didn’t like him—for whatever reason, he wasn’t too sure. Maybe she didn’t like hockey players. Actually, now that he thought of it, remembered how she and Coach Chen had beheld one another with more scepticism than was necessary when they first met, that seemed to be the exact case.
She didn’t greet him, rather opening the conversation with, “You’re here to help again, I assume.”
The sound of your skates sliding against the ice drifted through the air. “I am,” he confirmed.
She hummed, clearly still unhappy.
Yufan pulled his laces tighter, extending his leg further from him to get the most out of it. He said, without looking her in the eye, “Something tells me you don’t like me, shifu. Why?”
She tsked, almost as if she didn’t want to respond. Then, “Hockey men are bad luck for my girls. My first student had a boyfriend just like you, and he almost ruined her career.”
Well, that was one reference point, the audience might be thinking. Right? That hypothesis is totally flawed. “Trust me, I want nothing more than to help,” he said earnestly, because it was the truth. He wanted you to succeed, and if he could make your path to destiny more bearable, why wouldn’t he?
“Hmph.” She glanced at him, through the corner of her eye. “We’ll see about that.” Before he could retort, or dig himself deeper into the hole she’d made for him, a sharp sound echoed from inside the rink, the sound of skin and bone thumping against the ice. Peiling turned, eyes narrowing as she rushed to the barrier, shouting, “What happened? What did you do now?”
“Nothing,” you wheezed, holding up a hand to signal that you were alright. “Just a triple toe loop gone wrong.”
Yufan shook his head in mild amusement, opening up the barrier door and getting onto the ice after following after your coach, skating over to where you’d fallen to help you up. “You alright?” he asked, glancing at you with badly disguised concern. “That looked pretty bad.”
“It’s fine,” you assured him, squeezing your hip—where he’d assumed you’d fallen. “I’ll probably just have some bruising; it’s nothing that’ll keep me from practicing. Speaking of…”
And so, the rest of his afternoon was lost to your training. You went over your programs, the moves you’d planned, the music you’d picked out. For your short program, you were planning on a triple flip and toeloop, a double Axel, fly camel spin, triple Lutz, change combo spin, step sequence, and a layback spin, all to On the hills of Manchuria. You flowed through the practice session easily, moving through the routine, through the music, as if it were second nature.
Your free skate was a different monster. Triple Lutz, triple loop, triple toeloop, and double Axel that transitioned into a quadruple fly camel spin, a choreography sequence that made way for another double Axel, single Euler, and triple flip. Again, triple Lutz, double toeloop, triple flip, quadruple layback spin, and at the swell of the music, a quadruple Salchow. You’d finish with a triple step sequence, and a quadruple change combo spin, to none other than a shortened version of Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty’s Valse.
Only two other female figure skaters in the history of the sport had ever attempted a quad Salchow—while the jump on its own was one of the easier ones, completing it in four rotations was virtually unheard of. For you to attempt it at your age… It was a high-risk, high-reward move. You’d been practicing it since you were introduced to quads, you’d told him, though there was something about the Salchow, some sort of mental or physical block, that had made it nearly impossible for you to complete twice in a row.
You went through the motions of your free skate, Yufan keeping a reasonable distance behind you as you circled the ice. “Tell me if you need me,” he’d told you, though he knew you didn’t. “Just look back, and I’ll be there.”
You got all the way through the first half without a hitch; after your closing move, you landed on your left foot, rushing backwards with your arms spread, body swaying to the music as if you were dancing. Yufan watched as you bowed, lifted yourself up in one languid movement, gliding across the ice in one consuming sweep. You turned, readying yourself for the triple Lutz; as you spun through the air, thinking of your next move, Yufan found himself entranced with the way you landed and swept yourself straight into it, placing the pick of your skate behind the other, vaulting yourself into the air. You wheeled around, legs moving back and forth over the smooth surface beneath you, before twisting to launch yourself into a triple flip, sweeping your leg out from behind you and spinning like a top, your hands coming up from behind you, above you, around you, moving in time to the up and down of the string instruments; the jaunty tune playing perfectly to your ministrations.
For a moment you didn’t look like a girl who had too many ear piercings or an attitude; you looked like a proper lady, who spoke clearly and gently. It was odd, seeing that part of your personality, even though Yufan knew it was there. The music only added to your grace, to your impossible elegance. The violins and piccolos all layered over one another… it felt like falling in love.
That was when you stumbled, just as you were about to take off, your arms braced around your front and all. You cursed as you landed oddly, skidding to a halt at the edge of the rink. Yufan followed soon after, stopping a few metres behind you, waiting for you to say something.
You took a moment to regain your composure, before you turned to the barrier, where Peiling had been observing your practice with a stony face. You gave her a thumbs up, silver rings glimmering in the harsh rink light, and said, “I’ll try again!”
And, boy, did you try. And try, and try, and try, until the sun had set and there was no way within human limits that you were not exhausted yet. The music did not stop, not Tchaikovsky, nor Ilya Shatrov, and neither did you. It got to the point where you’d done so many loops, so many spins, that Yufan was beginning to get nauseous on your behalf. When you dared to try and practice your quad Salchow a fourth time, and doing so by starting your routine from the very top, Yufan skated towards you, laying gentle, sure hands on your shoulders, and looking into your eyes with the intensity of a man who wanted to be in bed yesterday.
“Pretty girl,” he said, voice hushed from exhaustion. “Babe. Baby. Ice Queen. Please… no more.”
You exhaled, struggling to catch your breath. Still, you didn’t seem to catch on to the signals your own body was sending your way. “You can go home if you’d like, Yu. I didn’t expect you to stay all the way through for all of my practices.”
He chuckled breathlessly, because who were you to be so disgustingly devoted to your work? “That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the fact that we have been here for hours, and that, I’m sure, your feet are going to start bleeding if you don’t go home in the next thirty seconds.”
You hesitated, eyes flicking to the ground. “But… I feel like I could practice my Salchow more.”
He raised a brow. “How long has it been part of your routine?”
“Since I was introduced to quads,” you answered immediately, the words sending you into inspirational autopilot.
“Right. And you’ve been practicing it for just as long. So, what I’m trying to say is,” he added, because he noticed you wanting to protest yet again, “you’ve got this.”
“What if I don’t?” you asked. “What if I try it, and I fail?” Your eyes widened, pupils shaking as more questions piled into your mind. “What if I fall in front of all of those judges, and I have to go into early retirement from the embarrassment? Wh— what if I make a complete fool of myself in front of the whole panel of judges?” You huffed, growing agitated in the face of his silence. “Why aren’t you saying anything? Yu—”
“You’re a talented girl,” Yufan interrupted firmly, giving your shoulders a little shake. “I know that. You know that. Everyone knows that. But what you need to realise is that whether or not you succeed, whether or not you become the star you want to be, is completely up to you. And you know what you’re doing.”
There was something about you, standing in front of him, full cheeks and dreamy eyes, that made his heart hurt. That made him wonder where all his talent, all his tact had gone. He’d been on top of the world when he met you, and since then, he’d just been going backwards. You, however, did the opposite. You’d been placing second and winning silver when you met him, and since meeting him, you’d been invited to prestigious events, been on training camps out of the country, gone further than he ever would.
It wasn’t fair. That you had the ability to work as hard as you did, but once Yufan reached a certain point, his body simply refused to cooperate. Why couldn’t he be pushed to your extremes, the kind that kept your posture upright, that kept your body fit, that kept your mind sharp? Why couldn’t he be more like you?
“Thanks, Yufan, but will all due respect, I think I know my abilities better than you do,” you murmured, taking a step back from him.
Okay. What the fuck? “All I said was that you know what you’re doing,” he pointed out lightly. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
You didn’t take it as lightly as he presented it. “My technique has been slipping for the past week, so, no, I wouldn’t. I’ve still got a lot of headway to make, and your patronising comments aren’t helping in the least.”
“I’m not trying to be patronising,” he laughed, in growing disbelief.
“Oh, really? Whether or not I succeed is completely up to me? I already know that, genius, and you saying anything about it isn’t going to help me become a better skater,” you snapped.
Yufan could see in your eyes that you were tired. That’s why you were being like this. Difficult. Yet still, he bothered to respond like you were in your right mind, “I’m just lifting you up a little, babe. It’s not a big deal. You should be more confident in yourself. A quad Salchow should be nothing to you.”
That was not the right thing to say.
“Nothing?” you spat. “Only two women in the history of figure skating have executed it in competition, and it should be nothing for me?”
He tried, “That’s not what I meant—”
“How could you know what you’re talking about?! You’re a hockey player, Yufan. We’re not on the same level.”
Silence. He took a step back, face hardening with something like anger. A deep, shuddering breath escaped his lips, and when he looked up at you, his jaw twitched. “You don’t mean that,” he tried lowly.
You stubbornly stood your ground. “Don’t I?”
He didn’t want to believe you did, no. Not when he’d spent so much time with you by his side, helping him, teasing him, loving him. How heartbroken was he supposed to be if it turned out to be the truth? If the girl he’d unknowingly idolised for so long didn’t even respect him enough to hear him out on something he was so sure of?
Then again, why would he have to compromise himself for you when you’d shown time and time again you wouldn’t ever do the same for him. Why waste that time? Why take that risk? He chuckled, the sound dark and brittle, shrugging. “I don’t need this,” he announced. “You don’t want me here? I’ll leave. I’ll leave you to roll in self-pity, because you seem to like your own company a hell of a lot more than mine.”
You froze. For a moment, he could imagine traces of disappointment in your features. But just like the seasons, just like your love, it was gone as soon as it had come. “Door’s that way,” you chirped, indicating the exit.
“Right,” he said. And then he was gone. You were alone all over again.
As you watched him leave, something in your gut told you to take off your skates and run after him. Fix things, tell him you were sorry about what you said. You didn’t think he was stupid, or worth less just because he played a different sport. Why would you even say something like that? There were a million reasons, none of them good enough for Yufan. It wasn’t the heat of the moment; it wasn’t stress, or fatigue, or fear. It was nothing more than your own selfishness, your own ill temper.
You sighed, shoulders sagging as you reluctantly threw in the towel and called it a night, skating to the edge of the barrier and opening up the short swing door, climbing off the ice with wobbly legs.
THAT SAME NIGHT
The locker room was, from what you could see after practice, deserted. Peiling hadn’t been in the stands for a while, though when you’d jogged outside the check if she’d gone home for the night, you came face to face with her beat up Prius in the parking lot; she was probably still in the rink somewhere, out of the sight from you, doing her odd coach things.
You strode back inside and to the locker rooms, tugging at the next of your top, which had begun to feel far too tight near the end of training. You approached the door, which was open only a crack, stopping once you heard voices, the sound of shoes pacing around the room. It sounded like someone, a woman and a man, talking over the phone.
“I don’t understand what you mean by that,” the woman said, disbelief staining her words. Your blood ran cold when you recognised Peiling’s voice. “She qualified just like everyone else.”
“But the board are looking to review her qualifications,” the man replied calmly. He sounded old, perhaps your grandparents’ age, or a bit younger, if you had to think about it. “We’ve considered that perhaps some of her competition points could be below the standard for skaters of her… her origin.”
“I cannot believe my ears. You are insinuating that because she is a foreigner, she cannot represent Taiwan, when all of our country’s biggest stars in this sport were born overseas?!”
“That is a different case altogether—”
“No, it is not. I built her up from nothing. I made her the skater that qualified, and I say she’s just as good as anyone else in her position, if not better, because she has to deal with old-fashioned folks like you constantly bringing her down. She deserves just as much as anyone else to represent her home country.”
“Not when the topic of foreign representatives has already stirred up controversy and feelings of inferiority in local skaters.”
A beat. Then, “She’s going to compete at Nationals, whether you like it or not. Got it? I didn’t waste ten years of my life on this girl for you to tell me she can’t perform.”
What a nice thing to hear from your coach.
You woke up on the morning of Nationals with a knot in your stomach. Everything felt off, from the moment you stepped out of bed and onto a floor that was too cold to bear, to the moment your parents drove you to the rink, and you met Peiling at the entrance, the sun looking wrong in the sky; its rays too pale, its heat too sparse.
In all regards, you looked ready. You were dressed in your costume—a glittering black ensemble that spoke of maturity and grace you didn’t feel you possessed, hair neat and completely out of the way. There was not a rip or a draw in your stockings, the blades of your skates shimmered as you hoisted them up to show to her, but nothing felt right.
Peiling grasped your shoulders, looking into your eyes with nothing but pride swimming in hers. Pride, and expectation. The neverending, unrelenting expectation of someone who had waged all their money, time, and dignity on a young girl with a dream. How cruel of her to believe in you.
Your parents made their way to the stands, but not without your mother crouching down to press a kiss to your forehead, Chihming giving you a gentle pat on the back, their actions speaking louder than words ever would. Good luck, their smiles seemed to say. We believe in you. You’re going to do great. Don’t mess this up. Please don’t mess this up. Shihan had texted you earlier that she’d already saved seats for your parents and for Yufan, right next to where she’d booked her seat, proclaiming having gotten the best view of the rink. Their eyes would be on you the whole time, she boasted. They’d get to see everything.
The locker room was eerily quiet, and at the very same time, a cacophony played over and over in your ears. Something mechanical—a fan, or a massage gun—buzzed to the right of you; someone knocked their skate guards against the floor as the hard plastic slipped out of their hands; someone was talking over the phone; someone else was praying. And you sat on your designated bench, your shaking legs braced in front of you.
Yufan hadn’t spoken to you all morning, save for the minimal texts you’d exchanged when talking about his and his parents’ seating arrangements. He’d barely even spoken to you since your last training session, since you’d stormed out on him and told him that he didn’t know what he was talking about. Just thinking about it made your insides churn. You were wrong for that. So, so wrong. You’d agreed, however, before all of that had happened, to meet each other, just for a moment, in the locker room, long before you were due to start. You hadn’t spoken of a time—you’d just told him that he could come whenever he wanted to. You felt now like you shouldn’t have told him to come at all.
You didn’t hear the door open, and only when a pair of familiar sneakers came into view did you realise that Yufan was already there. No avoiding him now. You looked up at him, eyes settling on his face—pretty, angered, worried—and stood up. He didn’t greet you; he knew he didn’t need to. You’d say all you needed to say right now, as you stood in front of him, if you were brave enough.
“I hope you and your parents didn’t have any problems finding your seats,” you began. He simply nodded. Somewhere in the far corners of the room, you could hear Peiling speaking with one of the other skaters’ coaches.
“She deserves just as much as anyone else to represent her home country.”
Yufan looked at you—really looked at you, attention as unwavering as his affection had been. “We didn’t,” he said. He paused then, though a silent question hung in the air. Why am I even here? Good question. Why was he even there? When you’d already told him that he didn’t know what he was doing, that he wouldn’t be useful to you going forward? If you wouldn’t, he’d bite. “Is there something you need to tell me?”
“Not when the topic of foreign representatives has already stirred up controversy and feelings of inferiority in local skaters.”
If you were brave enough, you could tell him. Tell him exactly what was on your mind. If you were brave enough. If only you were brave enough. “I’m thinking of cutting the quadruple Salchow from my routine.”
You’d wondered what his reaction would be to that in the days leading up to the competition. Would he be disappointed? Would he sigh to himself and say he’d expected you to chicken out? Would he be relieved? Would he say he was hoping that you would because of how dangerous it was, given the fact that you’d only accomplished it a handful of times? Would he be indifferent? Would he act normally and say what you did in your routine was your business, he was merely a spectator? Nothing you thought could’ve prepared you for the real thing.
“What do you mean?” he asked, brow furrowing in genuine confusion. “Wh— what do you mean you’re dropping it?”
“Well, I figured that since I’d only actually executed it a few times, I shouldn’t necessarily take the risk of trying it right now,” you explained. “I rather wouldn’t do it than do it badly.”
“You can’t do it badly, though,” he pointed out. “You’ve practiced it enough times to be able to do it right.”
“Okay, I’m just not confident enough just yet,” you replied, words quick. “I don’t want to take that risk.”
“How can you not be confident enough when you’ve been practicing this routine for years?” he asked, and the words came out harder than he’d meant for them to. Or maybe they landed just as he’d intended. “This sport is all about risks.”
You paused. “Figure skating isn’t the same as hockey, Yufan. I can’t just get onto the ice and do as I please. I need to be fully assured that I’m capable—”
“The thing is, you are,” he interrupted, “and you’re being ridiculous by suggesting that you aren’t.”
“Don’t interrupt me,” you said sternly. “Losing confidence is normal in this sport, okay? I’m not like you.”
He narrowed his eyes, mouth set in a thin line of question. “You know what? I’m not even going to ask you to expand on that disgustingly elitist comment, because I’m more concerned with the fact that, all of a sudden, you can’t do what you’ve been doing for the past ten years.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” you tried.
“Well, it sounds a lot like it! It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve executed it perfectly; you’ve been practicing the quad Salchow for years. You’re thinking too much about this. Just go out there and do your thing, and you’ll see, you’re capable.”
“Yufan, I’m trying to tell you that I’m not, okay? I can’t do it! It’s not me!”
“What is ‘you’, then? What are you, who are you, if not someone who can do this? When did you become such a coward?!”
Silence.
You took a step back. “Excuse me?”
“I asked, since when were you such a coward?” he repeated, unapologetic. “Since when do you think too much and act too little?”
“I’m not a coward,” you spat.
“Prove it,” he challenged. “Trust your skill and do the quad Salchow when it’s your time to perform.”
“That’s not how these things work, okay? I can’t just make up my mind not to do something, and change plans the day of a competition! It’s not like—”
“I swear to God, if you say something about hockey again—”
“You know what?” you asked, voice raising. “I’ll say what I want about your stupid sport. You don’t get to belittle me and call me names just because it’s what you’re used to as an athlete. If you want to treat me like one of your teammates, you can leave.”
He scoffed. “What, you’re telling me to leave because you can’t handle tough love?”
“This is all tough!” you said. “Where’s the love?” You shook your head, and when your eyes landed on him again, you beheld him with something akin to acceptance. “Get out.”
This seemed to sober him up. “What?”
“I said, get out. Walk away, and don’t look back. I wouldn’t want you to. We’re done.”
The first thing you noticed about the rink at Nationals was how bright it was. All ice skating rinks had to, according to the rules of the sport, be well-lit so as to ensure safe skating for any athlete, but there was something different about a rink that hosted the country’s best skaters. The ice was whiter than white, cold, and crisp, with the detailed swirls and twirls of blades engraved into its surface. The crowd was massive, a darkened mob surrounding your stage, the lights nearly blinding as you stepped onto the ice for your warmups.
You shared the space with one other skater; a girl by the name of Nana, who looked more familiar than she should have. She skated well, though you noted a slight hesitation in her movements whenever she readied herself for a spin. You failed to notice the tremble in your own hands, those moments between loops and twirls where you could’ve stumbled.
Your short program was a success, racking up a total of 78.45 points—42.43 in technical elements, and 36.02 in components. You’d done as you were told and moved in time with the music, losing yourself in the unfamiliarity of the sounds, of the sort of song you could only bear when your career depended on it. You were serenaded with a shower of gifts; flowers, teddy bears, and the approving nod of Peiling on the other side of the ice. Your parents cheered for you, whistling and clapping and waving the poster they’d made specially for you.
You’d smiled from your spot on the ice, grinning like a madwoman in the midst of all the praise, your chest rising and falling with rapid breaths as you tried to compose yourself. Your makeup, bold and bright and completely unlike you, glimmered under the lights, shimmering like the mist that separated fantasy from reality.
When you glanced at the leaderboard, you saw that you’d come steadily in second. You couldn’t reason that it was only because all the other skaters before you had fallen, or because they hadn’t executed their moves correctly. You had faith that you would win. You had to. Otherwise, what would it all have been for?
There was a small intermission that allowed you to catch your breath, while Peiling reviewed your routine from where she was seated next to you. She didn’t look at you as she spoke, rather at the judge’s panel, where she glared at one of the older men sitting at the very end. “You’ve dropped the quad Salchow from your routine, correct?” she asked.
“That’s what I’d planned on,” you said, voice trembling.
She hummed. “Mm. Alright. Then just make sure you do your other moves well enough. Skate like you didn’t even need it in the first place.”
You nodded. “I’ll try.”
“You won’t try,” she said. “You will.”
And before you could delay fate, it was your time.
You stepped onto the ice with shaking legs, your fingers trembling from where they rested at your sides as you glided to the centre, twisting and turning your body every which way to loosen your aching muscles. You looked down at your leading leg, exhaling deeply. Bruises and sore spots littered the joint, and surely many other areas of your body. You could barely hold yourself together.
Your routine started off well, with you sliding backwards across the ice, bracing yourself, lifting your arms in a gentle dance. You took a deep bow, twisting yourself up into the air, spinning once, twice, thrice, blades barely touching the ice before you were back in the air again, landing with little effort. After that, a backwards glide that ended in you pole vaulting into the air, assisted by the pick of your skate. The music drifted through the air, the bass reverberating through your body. You pulled your lips into a tight smile, facing the crowd as you rushed forward, lifting your knee for a double Axel. You turned, once, twice, and stuck the landing.
You moved easily through the single Euler and triple flip, and the crowd cheered briefly when you executed a particularly impressive triple Lutz. As you moved across the ice, your blades scraping against its freezing surface, you counted down in your head the numbers you had left before you could be blessed with a completed routine—double toeloop, triple flip, quadruple layback spin, and…
You hoped no one noticed you falter as your brain listed the quadruple Salchow as an automatic addition. Did you do it, and surprise everyone with an unexpected twist, or did you continue as everyone had anticipated, and complete your routine without taking any real risks?
You turned, readying yourself for the quadruple Salchow. as you bent your knee, arms lowering with the rest of you, you thought of Miki Ando. The first and only girl to land the move you were about to attempt. She’d been your age, performing on a much higher level, for a much larger audience. How were you supposed to feel, knowing that the one move you’d spent your entire career practicing had already been done before? Maybe Yufan was right. Maybe you did think too much, act too little. Maybe you were a coward. You sucked in a sharp breath as you flew into the air, the world around you spinning like a top. One, two, three…
Four. Your right foot made contact with the ice, its cold, hard, unforgiving surface. And then you spun again.
Except, you weren’t supposed to. You were supposed to glide seamlessly back into your routine, basking in the audience’s applause. Instead you turned, and now the ground was rapidly approaching.
Snap!
When people get injured, they often describe it as an out of body experience. Something that seems faraway, as if they weren’t present to witness the moment. Your injury was nothing like that.
You cried out as you came down, your shoulder hitting the ice. The pain travelled up at an alarming rate, the joint becoming dead weight.
In an instant, your senses sharpened. You became hyperaware of the pain shooting up your arm, not stopping until it seemed to throb inside your head, your temples burning with the ache. Of the harsh lights cast above you, next to you, behind you, shining even from under your closed eyelids. You heard people, voices cutting through the sound of your own ragged breathing. Skates rushing along the ice, faint sharp lines barely visible through your narrowed eyes. You weren’t sure if you screamed, or if you stayed silent. If you cried, or if the wetness on your cheeks was because of something else.
Whenever you finished a program, there was a moment of silence before the audience erupted in cheers. Before the bouquets were thrown and your name was called, over and over until even you believed you’d made first place. That never came. Instead, you were faced with the deafening silence of a shocked crowd, covering their mouths in horror.
And all you could do was stand up.
The medics tried to help you, but you brushed them off, shakily getting to your feet. You knew what happened next—you’d smile, bow to the crowd while wiping your tears, and they’d all let out a sigh of relief as you stepped off the ice and took a seat. That didn’t happen. Because when you attempted to bow, it was as if every muscle in your body screamed for you to stop, for you to stand upright and try to support your shoulder. It sagged forward, the bone bent at an odd angle.
“Fuck,” you swore, the word out before you could stop it. A medic rushed forward, and this time, you didn’t refuse his help. You let him, and several others of the medical team, help you off the ice, their hands braced firmly against your back.
Peiling was waiting for you at the barrier, her hands desperately grabbing onto you as she half hoisted you up, lifting your numb legs to sheathe your skates. You let her guide you to the kiss and cry, where you sat down with a heavy heart and medics fussed over you until they reached their final conclusion.
They said many things as they examined you; your body, your current state of being. A shock, murmured one, testing to see if she could pop the joint back into place. You teared up and told her to stop, and she did. Totally unexpected, murmured another in Hokkien. Other words and terms were also thrown around. Bad injury. Bone. Joint. Fractured collarbone. Broken clavicle.
“We’ll have to take her to the hospital,” said one of the medics, an older woman who turned to Peiling as she spoke. As if you weren’t even there. “This fracture requires immediate intervention that we can’t give her.”
“You think?” asked the younger man, the one who spoke Hokkien. Probably a medical student. Not much older than you.
“I know,” she said gravely.
All your coach did—all she could do—was nod, accepting the fate that had befallen you. There was nothing to be done about your routine, or what of it you were able to perform. As they carried you out of the rink on a stretcher they’d practically pushed you onto, you realised that you wouldn’t win. An incomplete set didn’t even get you second place. You’d done all that, all those jumps, those twirls, those nights you’d spent at the rink instead of being with your family, those fights you had with Yufan about your courage—all of it in vain.
Your parents made an appearance after all was said and done, when the ambulance had been called and activity in the competition had been halted as thousands of people awaited the outcome of your failure. Just before you were forcefully helped onto the stretcher, they came barrelling through a crowd of security guards, shouting obscenities as they tried to hold them back.
“Let them through,” Peiling barked. “They’re family.”
Your mother rushed to your side, taking your cold face in her warm palms. “Are you alright? Oh, my darling—what’s… what happened?” Then, before you could respond, to the young medic who’d practically carried you off the ice, “Will she be alright?”
He hesitated. “She—”
“My collarbone,” you said, your voice an unfamiliar drawl, a moan of pain, “clavicle. It’s broken.”
She gasped, Chihming’s hands coming up to keep her steady as she began to cry. You felt pity for her, you really did, but when you were the one who’d been injured, a wailing mother was not exactly a nice backing track to your pain.
You waved a hand in Peiling’s direction, and she seemed to understand your signal. Please make it stop. I love her, but please make it stop. Chihming did, as well, because when your coach approached your parents to gently urge your mother into silence, he just nodded and said he’d bring their car around so they could follow the ambulance to the hospital.
“Let us know if anything else happens,” he said, both to you and to Peiling. “Drive safe.”
Then came Shihan, her beautiful face taut with worry and panic. You’d been carried out by that time, and she’d jogged after the medics before you could get to the ambulance from where it wailed on the pavement outside the rink. You could hear the music of another skater’s set through the faint thrum of your own heartbeat. No surprise, they continued despite your absence. That was one of the things you’d loved about figure skating; no matter how bad something seems, no matter how many hits you take, you’d always have to get back up and let the show go on.
And your show couldn’t go on for much longer.
“Are you okay?” was the first thing she asked after pushing herself past the medics crowding you. Her hair fell over her shoulders in inky cascades. “Are you alright? Don’t tell me it’s a broken shoulder, or— or something bad like—”
“Han-eh,” Peiling said, voice low. “Calm down. We’re taking her to the hospital now. She’ll be fine.”
She glanced at your coach, then back at you, taking in the way your face was contorted in pain, the tears streaming down your cheeks. She reached up to wipe them away, saying, “Your— Yufan’s looking for you. He’s here. He wants to see you.”
Then a call of your name, in that sweet, high voice that once warmed you to your core, distressed and frenzied with fear. Now all it did was make your blood run cold.
You grabbed at Shihan’s wrist, shaking your head. You wanted to speak, wanted to scream, Get him away, but all you could do was say, with more acidity than she deserved, “I don’t want to see him.” Desperately, spitefully.
Her brow creased in confusion. Right. She wasn’t there, before the competition. “Not now?”
“Not ever,” you whispered.
It was all a disparaging blur once the ambulance doors shut. You were escorted to the emergency room, where you were immediately assisted by a doctor who spoke like the Osaka businessmen you’d met on training camps in Japan. Your parents stood by your side, each clutching one hand, braced for the worst despite already learning what everyone else knew of your injury.
The elderly medic had been correct in her assumption that you’d suffered a broken collarbone. The bone had shifted, nearly shattered during your fall. Your doctor told you that you’d been unlucky to fall from such a height, at such an impossible speed. You could only grimace as he pulled up an X-ray of your front, talking about the possible paths you could take in your healing. If you were careful, and took it terribly seriously not to move too much, and received a plentiful blessing from the gods, it would heal completely in four to six months.
Half a year. That was how long you’d have to wait to start training seriously again—who knew about how long it would take you to be restored to your full strength and health. Waste. Waste. Waste. That was all you could hear. Failure. The end of times. The worst of the worst.
You cried more times than you’d like to admit. Grieved harder for something you weren’t even sure was lost yet, that you were sure you’d never be able to get back. Your doctor merely glanced at you like you were something to pity, some sort of distressed child that was crying over nothing. Peiling had disappeared out of the room somewhere in the midst of everything, keeping her phone tucked between her shoulder and her cheek as she answered a call. Shihan sat at the edge of your bed while the doctor walked out, your parents following behind him.
She crossed her legs easily over the thin mattress, observing your surroundings. You’d been hastily given a scratchy grey blanket to wear over your costume, and were constantly readjusting your posture, frowning in discomfort. The emergency room was busy, despite it being the middle of the day. Perhaps more peoples’ lives fell apart than you thought every day. Perhaps you’d just never noticed them because you’d never been one of them. Conversations floated through the air, bits and pieces of patients’ personal lives revealed to you, laid bare under the flickering fluorescent lights.
When she spoke, she didn’t say what people had been telling you since you’d arrived. She didn’t tell you that everything was going to be alright, that you were sure to make a speedy recovery if you just rested enough and listened to the doctor’s advice. She didn’t hastily assure you that your career was over, or that this would all be a wonderful story to tell when you won the Olympics, or some anxious, sentimental drivel like that. She said,
“I used to have a Yufan, you know.”
Her tone of voice—soft, saccharine, thick with emotion—caught you off guard. She’d never sounded like that before. “What?” you asked, narrowing your eyes, swollen from crying.
“Yeah. He was a hockey player, and he was a year or two older than me. We met when I was around your age,” she told you. “He’d always let me sit at the very front of his games, and even gave me a signed hockey stick.” She frowned, smiling. “Not that I know who Wayne Gretzky is, but he did. And he cared, so I did, too.” She tilted her head, nodding to you, “Then we broke up… right before one of my competitions. That’s where I got this.”
She pulled up the left leg of her jeans, where you could see stitch marks on her knee, the skin raised where she’d been cut. Your eyes widened. When you glanced up at her, her gaze was still focused on the spot. “Is this why you took that break a few years ago? Because you got hurt?”
“Mm,” she nodded. “It took me months to even get back on the ice. Peiling’s hated hockey players ever since.”
Perhaps it was that single, throwaway comment, or the pain, or the absurdity of it all, but you laughed. For the first time in a while, you laughed; genuinely, and without scorn. It was a light sound, unfamiliar in how loud it was, how it tore through your body like it had been waiting to escape. Shihan laughed, too, and when you heard it, you realised you hadn’t ever heard her genuine laugh. It was a nice sound to hear.
“You know,” she said, when silence had finally settled over you again. “It’s not the end of the world that you got injured. And I’m going to spare you the motivational speech, because I know you’re probably sick of it by now.” She looked at you, long and hard. “Just know that you’re stronger than you think, and that your fate is in your hands. Not anyone else’s.”
Before you could continue your conversation, your very own coach rushed into the room, face drained of colour. You both glanced up at her, brows furrowing in confusion at her expression. “What is it, shifu?” Shihan wondered.
“What happened?” you echoed, concern etched into your pretty features.
Her voice was hoarse when she answered, as if she’d been screaming. Or crying. “The judges have made their decision… and we are expected to make an appearance at the stadium as soon as possible.”
东京 TOKYO
2024
Long story short, you got first place at Nationals. And again two months later at the World Championships, representing your country.
It was a momentous occasion, when you were called up to the podium by the announcer, her American accent sounding harsh pronouncing the gentler tones of your name. But you didn’t care how it sounded, or how badly she butchered it, because you’d won. After all your hard work, you’d finally won, and you had something worthwhile to prove it.
The work didn’t end there for you, unfortunately, not considering your injury.
It still hung in the air like a foul smell after your wins, after you became the Taiwanese public’s darling, after the world learnt your name. News outlets covered your fall at Nationals extensively, thought out excellent and horrible names for it, for what it meant for you as an athlete. A major setback, some called it, something that would permanently impact your career for years to come. A reminder that everyone, even the most talented skaters, are human, said another publication. You liked that one, though it left a bad taste in your mouth regardless.
Despite all that, despite your well-placed hatred for it, despite your family’s fear of it, despite your coach’s grief towards it, you did your best to treat it as gently as you would any life-altering injury, to give yourself the time to recover while refusing to atrophy, refusing to give in to the temptation of premature retirement. You simply couldn’t, was your reasoning, throw all your hard work away because of a fractured collarbone. It was only an injury; you were only a person. It could heal. You could heal. You would heal.
You practiced as frequently usual, though took it undeniably easier on yourself in terms of exercises. You listened to your doctor, took her advice in stride and applied it diligently, determined to get yourself back to the way you were before you could change too much. You went on training camps, focused on rehabilitation, did everything you could in your position.
You did, however, take an indefinite hiatus from competing. You wouldn’t return to the beloved sport until you’d healed, physically and mentally. You wouldn’t return to the rink until you did so on your terms, no one else’s.
It was on one of these training camps, in the wonderful city of Tokyo, that you found, after hearing from a friend of a friend who’d been travelling with you, that there would be a series of hockey games in the area. The local team, the Tokyo Snow Leopards, playing against several smaller, less well-known teams. One of them being the Taipei Eagles.
“You know one of the players, right?” Lili, one of the girls you’d been training with since arriving in Tokyo, asked you one night. She’d signed herself up after suffering a nasty cut to the face that her teammate gave her during pairs training. “Um… what’s his name?” She turned to your other roommate, Jingxue, a girl from Shanghai who’d come after an ACL injury, and snapped her fingers as if searching for the answer. “He’s the cute defenceman?”
Jingxue shrugged hopelessly. She didn’t say much, you’d noticed.
You butted in, eager to get Lili to stop talking. “Yeah, I, uh… I don’t remember his name, but I know who you’re talking about. Yeah, we used to train together, a while ago. Not sure how he’s been these days.”
Lili rolled her eyes at her own forgetfulness, waving it off dismissively. “I’ll remember his name soon, but, yeah, you know who I’m talking about. Have you seen him since… I dunno, since?”
You shook your head. “Nope,” you denied, popping the ‘p’.
It’s what brought you here, at the nearest ice skating rink, sitting in the stands, caught between a roaring crowd around you and a deteriorating game in front of you. The Taipei Eagles uniform was different from the old team’s—or, could you really say old, when this was simply the senior league, and the Polar Bears had been the junior league? Regardless, where their uniforms had been red, white, and blue, the Eagles went for an undeniably mature look, opting rather for black, white, and navy blue.
James was as easy to spot as he had been two years ago, still the quickest player on the ice, still a large, bold 16 on the back of his jersey. You couldn’t see much else of him; couldn’t see much else of anyone besides the crowd members around you, really. Hockey was certainly a spirit- and personality-forward sport where the audience couldn’t judge anyone by appearances. That’s how you knew you wouldn’t ever be able to play the sport—you liked appearances far too much.
The air was as stale and electric as the air at any other hockey game would’ve been, lit up with the sounds of players’ skates slicing against the ice, with the smell of snow in your nostrils, with the heat of the moment creeping up your neck. It was undeniably addictive, and just as dangerous.
The game progressed well, or, perhaps, as well as you could perceive it did, because for all the changes you’d gone through since you’d last been in a place like this, you’d learnt nothing new about hockey. And just as well, really. You had far more important things to worry about. You wondered, then, how much James had changed, if at all. Looking down at him, it seemed he’d grown at least a bit. Perhaps a centimetre or five, something that could elevate him from a teen boy to a young adult. You wondered if he was still a clown. Still bitter inside. Still obsessive, still mean. Still your Yufan.
You knew he wouldn’t be. Yours in the literal sense, you mean. It had been nearly one and a half years since you’d last seen him, and you’d made it clear how you felt about each other that day. That last, all-too fateful day. But you wondered if he was still yours in the sense that he was still the same James you’d known. Still funny. Still passionate. Still kind. Still your Yufan.
Time passed, and eventually the first intermission became the second, then the third, and people were starting to get impatient waiting for the outcome of the game. It was a close one so far, Snow Leopards, six, Eagles, five. Only one or two more goals to determine who would be taking home this game’s trophy, this audience’s hearts.
The players were moving in a way that didn’t completely make sense to you. Agitation hung in the air, and it translated into their jerky movements, their sudden, reckless decision-making. At one point, one of his teammates threw James against the barrier, yelling in his face about a some kind of mistake he’d made. He’d simply shrugged him off, rolling his eyes like he would have years ago. The game continued, but you, and you were sure everyone else, could tell that something was off.
It was odd, how much it reminded you of your first performance at Nationals, despite the two having no correlation. But something in the air was the same; the prickling of nerves, the expectations hanging like heavy clouds threatening rain. The light was the same, the rink too bright, the stands too dark. You could only imagine what it looked like to the skaters on the ice—the looming darkness circling them, giving them tunnel vision. A loud, mechanical buzz cut through the pop music booming from the arena speakers that hadn’t done much to help the growing tension, the agitation you felt. The Snow Leopards had scored another point. Seven, five.
Buzz! Eight, five.
Buzz! Eight, six. A Japanese player was showed to the penalty box, face sour.
Buzz! Eight, seven. One of his teammates joined him, the Taiwanese skaters jeering in glee. That earned them a stern look from the referee, a young woman, and they shut up soon after that.
It was in the final minutes of the game that everything fell apart. The Snow Leopards had been spread thin, half of the team in the penalty box, the other half a mixture of their lacklustre and bench players. And yet, they still seemed to be sweeping the floor with their opponents. Tensions rose, and the Eagles were getting desperate for the win.
Two players had collided, fists and sticks flying. Somewhere in the midst of their scuffle, the puck had been stolen, and the crowd held unanimously their breath. Below, James raced across the ice eyes, alight with opportunity. This was his chance. His I made it moment. He’d make it. He would score, he thought, he knew, as he passed by the commotion, moving with all the grace of a trained figure skater, with the determination of a man who’d committed his life to a sport that would repay him now. All those evenings after school, all those training camps that nearly bankrupted his parents, all those fights, all that pain, it would all be worth it if he just made this one goal. His third of the game, his last of the season. He was close. So, so close.
A small sound, so quiet, so internal that no one but James could hear it. Small, nonthreatening, as he twisted his leg, just that little bit too far, too hard, too desperate, to make a turn. Snap!
You shot up from your seat.
He stopped. In the middle of the ice. Dead in his tracks, flat on his side. The scuffle stopped, players hovered around him with taut faces, expressions contorted with tension. Silence swept over the stadium like a hushed storm; some people stood up, their hands clutched to their chests; others stayed where they were, clamping their mouths shut in shock. What would’ve happened if this were a normal fall was this: the crowd would wait in anticipation for James to get back to his feet, to bow and show that he was fine, he was unharmed. That never happened. They’d wait for the okay, before erupting into applause, cheering for a diligent, passionate athlete taking a chance. That didn’t come.
Instead, he stayed where he was, curling into a foetal position, gloved hands encircling against his knee. His coach, a younger man, perhaps a decade or so older than James himself, rushed from beyond the barrier, slipping onto the ice in nothing but his sneakers, struggling until he reached him. They exchanged a few words, and the two teams skated closer, hiding them from the crowd. It was all a blur of activity from there; medics rushing the ice, James pushing them away and insisting that he was fine, that he didn’t need their help to stand up. Teammates exchanging worried glances, opponents bowing in respect as he finally took his leave, wincing in pain with every move.
“Apologies, everyone, but we will need to take an emergency intermission on account of the Taipei Eagles’ defenceman’s injury. We will back in fifteen minutes with an update, and the game will resume shortly thereafter. Thank you for your patience.”
It seems to be so that, when the gods bring together two people as competitive and desperate as yourself and James, they throw a dice to decide who would win. And winning, well, that looks different to everyone. Sometimes it is literal—they beat their opponent; their opponent is their love, and their prize could be physical. Sometimes it refers to something larger than any two people—life, how it beats them; they are in a match against fate, in a fight against life and death, and their lives depend on the outcome of the game.
Other times it’s a mixture of both. The competitors—lovers, friends, family, enemies, all four at once—are thrown into the game of life, and each trial they face, they live through together, on opposite sides of the net, or the glass, or the field, is a period in the match. There are intermissions, inbetween moments where the tensions ease, where you could love one another. These don’t last too long, not usually. Not when you are as competitive as you are. Once they are over, once the whistle has been blown, it is as if you are nothing and everything to each other.
You forget that this, that love isn’t really supposed to be a game, that fate does not favour those that adhere to its ridiculous fancies with the simple belief that it will lead them to where they belong. You forget that humans connect by cooperating, by listening, by compromising. You forget that you are not pieces on a chess board, the outcome of your game dependent on anyone besides yourselves, athletes standing in front of judges and spectators, waiting for someone else to decide how they should continue.
There is a winner. Of course there is—in these games, there always is. But this win, it’s bitter. It leaves a sour taste in your mouth, leaves tears brimming in your eyes. It makes you remember that the path to victory is paved with heartbreak and betrayal. It reminds you that there can only be one winner that takes it all.
You were the one unlucky enough to win. You returned from the hospital after Judge Liu had called Peiling to tell her that you’d won, that you’d placed first in the 2023 Taiwan Figure Skating Championships, and you were helped onto the podium by the two skaters who’d placed in the positions below you, bronze and silver. You turned to the cameraman in front of you, holding your gold medal with trembling fingers, smiling as widely as you could will yourself to. Cameras flashed all around you, blinding you, burning into your retinas. The cheers of the judges and spectators were deafening, though their voices all faded away when all was said and done, when you’d looked at your peers, and realised you were all alone on that podium.
Wen Jiyi, a figure skating prodigy from Kaohsiung, the girl who’d come second place to you, turned to find her family all rushing towards her with large smiles on their faces, thanking Buddha for his kindness towards them, towards their daughter, who not only made it to Nationals, but made it this far. You could hear her friends cheering for her from the stands, chanting her name like a carol.
Hsu Nana, one of your old classmates, the girl who’d come in last, was embraced by her father, his strong arms enveloping her in a strong hug. They’d only had each other, you remembered; her mother was out of the picture before she could get any siblings, and her father had never remarried. And still, with what little they had, with her coming in third overall, her father murmured into her hair, “You’ll always be a winner in my book.”
And you? You were alone. Your family was at a private hospital, filling out forms for you, listening to your doctor explain your healing plan to them. Your friends had fallen away over the years because you’d chosen to focus on the one thing that would repay you more graciously than any relationships would. Your coach watched fretfully from the barrier, holding your new crutches in her hands. And your boyfriend’s parents were watching you, clapping for you, unaware that you’d left their son behind simply because he’d questioned your confidence.
You’d won. You’d made it. All that lay ahead was success; some healing would get in the way, yes, but after those quick four, five months, you’d be free to become the star you’d always been meant to be. Nationals, World Championships, Grand Prix, the Olympics. The world was an oyster you’d wrenched open, and you could do what you pleased with it. But all that, at what cost?
The spotlight shone brighter on those without anything to hold them back, but did it keep you warm when night fell, and people forgot about the stars in the sky?
“What are you doing here?” were James’ first words to you since Nationals.
You stood in front of him, a gentle, contemplative expression on your face. Behind you, the nurse had closed the curtains so that you could have some privacy, though it did nothing to drown out the sounds of the emergency room. You could faintly hear the conversation of a couple in the bed next to you, and tried to pay no mind to the fact that it sounded as if the patient’s boyfriend were accusing her of arson.
James had changed in the time you were apart; neither for better or for worse, just… naturally, as all humans change. Your suspicion that he’d grown taller was proven correct as your eyes swept over his form, over the plains of his lean body. His hair was longer, bleached and coloured to a light brown that looked like autumn. His face was the same, if not more mature, the twist of his lips dissatisfied where it had always been content. His eyes were still as kind as you remembered them, yet undeniably morose. Like something had broken him, and he hadn’t gotten to healing it yet.
You could only imagine how different you looked from the last time you saw James; taller, more mature, stronger, yet carrying yourself with that familiar attitude that dared anyone to doubt you. It was more steadfast than before, perhaps. There were wounds, and tears, and breaks, but that didn’t make you any less yourself.
“I was worried about you,” was your response.
He stared at you like he’d been staring at you for the past ten minutes. “That’s not what I mean,” he said, as if you were supposed to know. “I mean, what are you doing in Japan?”
You smiled softly, the realisation shifting your demeanour. “Oh. I was here on a training camp, just for some rehab. I hurt my ankle pretty badly in a competition a few weeks ago, and Peiling insisted I come to Tokyo for treatment and practice.”
He nodded, not gracing you with a response just yet. His gaze drifted from you, dropped somewhere below him, surveying the brace around your ankle. “So nothing’s changed,” he spoke, voice empty. “You’re still as clumsy as ever.” He remembered all the bruises, all the accidental falls when you failed to adjust to being off the ice, the cases of wobbly legs where he needed to brace you against him, his arm winding over your shoulder, keeping you close to him.
“I guess so,” you agreed. The silence that followed wasn’t natural; it was one that came only to people who’d once in their lives meant everything to each other, and met again when they were completely different people. Except, you weren’t that different from before, were you? “What’s the diagnosis?”
He sighed. “A severe lateral meniscus tear. I’m out for the season.”
You had anticipated something like that. But no amount of anticipation could’ve prepared you for the pain falling over his handsome face. There was something about it that made you feel as if you weren’t meant to see it—the tremble of his bottom lip, the way he tried to keep his tears at bay, the sheer, charged emotion of the scene, humanity in its rawest form. Yet, here he was, James Chao, letting you see, not for the first time in your lives, a part of him he’d hidden from anyone else.
No, the first time had been much happier. It had been when he’d introduced you to his parents, then again when he’d indirectly hinted that he loved you as much as he loved his own friends and family. Then it had been in every fight you had where he didn’t yell, where he didn’t disagree simply to prove a point, where he let you humiliate him like he never would’ve allowed anyone else to.
He tried to keep a brave face; of course he did. That was his forté, pretending as if he were unaffected by anything that happened around him, to him. You wished he hadn’t built up those walls around you, but this time around, you couldn’t fault him for it. He’d let them down and you’d selfishly exploited that. You didn’t deserve to see him any more vulnerable than he was already allowing you.
You took a seat at the end of his bed, next to where he’d braced himself on the heels of his palms, his legs swung over the edge, not because he’d invited you, but because you could feel something in you telling you to sit down. To brush your clothed knee with his bandaged one, to press your shoulder against his arm. The gods, high above, sitting along their great panel, moving another piece on the playing mat which was your intertwined fates. Taking pity. Thinking, Maybe?
James let you, ducking his head until he was almost level with you, where he was usually a head taller. He let you touch him, if only briefly, let himself bask in your unfamiliar warmth. You felt differently from how you did, once, when you were younger. Not bad. Just natural. Like all people are different as they grow.
“I’m sorry,” you said, when the silence became too much for you to bear. Your voice was hushed, and you felt like a criminal standing before a judge, eager to keep the attention off you, to fill the silences in which you could be accused, or asked questions. “For not…”
What? For not visiting? For not apologising sooner? For not being a better person to you? For behaving awfully when all you were trying to do was help? For being a scared, misguided, dogged teenager? For taking advantage of your kindness? For not kissing you after that last practice we had together, after you moved closer and told me you wanted to?
“…for everything,” you sighed. “You deserved better. You deserve better than what I can give you.” Than what the world’s given you, you thought, but couldn’t say.
He smiled breathlessly, wiping harshly at his eyes as if to clean tears that hadn’t yet fallen. “What am I going to do, now?” he asked, perhaps to no one in particular, perhaps to you specifically. After all, you’d dealt with a career-altering injury before. You’d know how to go about it, what he should do next, which steps he should take to get himself back on track. But the path that works for one may not work for the other.
You knew what he was thinking: what he’d been thinking for the longest time. That hockey was his only option, the only thing he was good at, the only future he saw for himself.
You exhaled gently, hands twitching as if they longed to reach out and grasp onto his ringed fingers, feel his warmth. And you told him the words that could’ve helped you once, if you’d been more grateful then, “You’re a talented boy, Yufan. I know that. You know that. Everyone knows that. But what you need to realise is that your talent doesn’t only lie in one thing.”
“But what if it does?”
You shrugged. “How are you supposed to know if you never try something new?”
If you never give yourself a second chance?
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
When he cried, when he broke down in tears next to you, burying his face in his hands as sobs racked his body, you acted against your better judgement and curled an arm around his shoulder. He responded to the touch like it was second nature, leaning into your chest like you were a lifeline who’d left him when he’d needed you most. Your hands froze, stayed millimetres from his skin, only a breath away from actually touching him like you wanted to. Needed to.
In that moment, there were a million things you could say. A million things you wanted to say. But all those words, those sentiments, those apologies, those proclamations and confessions, died in your throat; because nothing could mend the wound you’d caused. Not even you cradling him to your chest could fix it, could fix the hurt you’d inflicted on him, not even the way his lips pressed against your healed collarbone could erase the words he’d said, the things he’d done in his anger and jealousy towards you. Nothing could change what you’d said when you were nothing more than two terrified teenagers who didn’t know the difference between competition and love.
Could they ever be erased, or fixed, or mended, or healed, if a second chance came along? Or would that simply be something you were left to ponder as you grew?
香港 HONG KONG
2025
“Okay, so, our flight is in two hours, which means we’ll need to be at the boarding gate in fifteen minutes—”
“In what world should we have to wait at the boarding gate for over an hour? We’ve got plenty of time to explore and pass the time until at least half an hour before we need to board.”
Your friend gave you an unimpressed look, like, Really? Kim Juhoon, despite being a world-famous, overachieving figure skater at the ripe age of seventeen, was somehow one of the most neurotic, perpetually unsure people you’d ever met. So much so that, on his way back from competing at the World Championships as one of the two youngest athletes, where he would be hopping on a plane to Taipei so that you could show him where you’d grown up, he insisted that you wait at the boarding gate for more than an hour and a half, just to be safe. His words, not yours.
“Don’t make that face at me,” you said, shaking your head like a dismissive elder sibling. “I know what I’m talking about. You need to relax, Jju. Nothing bad is going to happen if we’re not a million hours early for our flight.”
He pointed a perfectly manicured and terribly accusatory finger at you. “You’re exaggerating to make me look stupid, and I won’t let you do it. I just won’t.”
“You already did,” you teased, grinning.
Even in all these years, airports had never lost their charm to you. The fluorescent lights beat down on the polished white floors, the night sky countering it like the moon did the sun. People filled up the place, walking to and fro, making arrivals and departures, saying goodbye to their families, kissing their spouses in greeting. The air smelled fresh, like air freshener and new beginnings. Old memories, new places. The good, and the unexpected.
Your coaches looked at you from where they strode at an alarming pace several metres ahead, before turning to each other, like, These kids. Meanwhile, you and Juhoon marvelled at the sight of a couple dragging their very fussy toddler out of a nearby takeout spot, the baby a screaming, wailing mess.
“That’s kind of how I feel right now,” Juhoon noted calmly.
You chuckled softly. Both of you were still reeling from your competition—the annual World Championships, this time held worlds away in Boston, had left you fatigued and a little bit out of sorts. Like, on a different plane of existence out of sorts. Still, you’d qualified, and secured spots at the September Qualifiers in Beijing, so it would all pay off in time.
“Same,” you agreed, bobbing your head.
Since Juhoon had insisted on being at the boarding gates two hours early, you’d made your way through the airport without much consideration for ogling at the great building, though Hong Kong International Airport was, in your opinion, a true beauty to behold. You did, however, stop at a few of the digital advertisements, displayed on larger than life boards and featuring some of your friends promoting products from their various sponsors. Juhoon snapped a selfie of the two of you in front of an Adidas board, sending it to one of his school friends—a swimmer on his way to the 2028 Olympics—with a particularly cheeky caption; the two of you posed in front of one of Shihan’s Dior adverts, pulling faces and mimicking her own, and so on and so forth you went until you actually came across an ad with your face on it.
It was one of your more recent campaigns for an energy drink—the audience is open to decide which, depending on how they view you. You were posed on the ice, in your training outfit, jewellery glimmering in the grainy film shot. There was some sort of quirky caption written in the air next to you, something that convinced the audience you actually got your energy from their product. It seemed like a candid scene, poised as if you’d been caught in a mundane moment in the middle of training, though the way you appeared more photogenic than you knew you were let you, and only you, know that it was staged. You tended to look a bit less human when you’d been exercising for two hours straight.
“Wah,” said Juhoon, mouth open in feigned shock. “Looking good, ttangkong.”
“Pfft— shut up,” you said, shoving his shoulder. “I didn’t say anything about your Louis Vitton ad, wugui.”
“I saw you snap that sneaky picture,” he shot back. He turned to you, narrowing his eyes. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you posting it, either.”
You rolled your eyes, raising your hands in a gesture of surrender. “So I posted a picture of my talented, handsome friend,” you said. “Sue me.”
He shook his head, yawning. He stretched his arms over his head, tears gathering at the corners of his eyes, his shirt riding up to expose the too-low waistband of his jeans. “I’m too tired to call my lawyer right now. You’ll have to settle for a formal complaint.”
You shrugged. “Fine by me. Now—” you picked up your shoulders, pulling your pink suitcase behind you— “we going to the boarding gate, or what?”
Juhoon smiled softly, nodding. “Yeah,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Leggo, or I’ll have an anxiety attack.”
“Jjinja?” you teased, the world rolling uneasily off your tongue.
“Ni hen fan ei,” he sighed, swift and easy.
You scoffed, landing a faint punch to his shoulder. “So annoying,” you muttered. “Let’s go.”
On your way to the boarding gate, you were distracted for a second time by something catching your eye. You stopped; Peiling, Juhoon, and his coach kept walking, not noticing that you’d halted, and were now staring at the double doors of the airport’s gift shop, gaze trained on whatever was behind the thick glass.
Something churned in your stomach, told you to go inside, to see what the tiny tourist trap had to offer. You turned to them, speaking absently over your shoulder, “Uh, you guys go ahead. I just want to check something out, here.”
“Hmm?” Juhoon hummed in question.
“I’ll be with you now,” you said, your feet already carrying you to the entrance. And that was the last any of them saw of you for the next fifteen minutes.
You wandered into the shop, your entrance signalled by the chime of a bell above the door, and realised relatively quickly that it certainly wasn’t its charm that had pulled you in. It was chock full of tacky tchotchkes, red and yellow lanterns hung all over, with rows upon rows of magazines and T-shirts that said ‘I HEART HK’ all over the front. You wrinkled your nose in distaste, wilfully ignoring the fact that you were wearing a shirt with the same print on it, though the smell of incense was a welcome sensation.
The shop seemed to be empty save for you and the elderly owner, who was ducked behind the counter, seemingly in search of something. Music drifted through the air from an old record player, the quality as dusty and old-fashioned as the tunes themselves, reminiscent to the Cantopop you knew James’ father listened to.
You found James Chao among the racks of tasteless souvenirs, perusing the shelves as if he were actually thinking of buying something. You stopped in your tracks when you saw him, your boots scuffing against the grainy floor. That something. It had always been that something.
He looked different from the last time you’d seen him in Tokyo. Of course he did—people changed. You’d changed. Your parents had changed. Taipei had changed. Why wouldn’t James? He couldn’t be your emotionally constipated older boyfriend forever.
It seemed he’d finally finished growing, standing nearly a head taller than you still; that hadn’t changed, at least. His hair was shorter, spikier, blonde highlights peeking out from between his natural roots. He wore a fitted denim jacket, tufts of fur lining the collar; his jeans hung low on his slim hips, and for a moment, you wondered when he’d become so fashionable. So grown up. You supposed it needed to happen sometime. He was due to turn twenty this year, after all.
A few things hadn’t changed, as well, perhaps to ease your heart out of the assumption that the boy you’d loved had become a man you knew nothing of. A pair of tinted, frameless glasses were tucked into his T-shirt, and when he slid them onto his face to examine the price of a snowglobe with a miniature Buddha in it, he looked almost identical to how he did on the nights he brought his homework to the skating rink, solving complex Calculus equations while you skated frenzied laps around the ice. A pair of silver earrings dangled from his earlobes, the same you’d gotten him for your one month anniversary. Odd to think you’d even made it that far when you fucked it up immediately afterwards.
Again, you wondered what he would think if he’d turned to see you staring at him. You’d grown up quite a bit since Tokyo, since Nationals. You now wore the glasses you’d dreaded to in place of those tricky contact lenses; your eyes still didn’t work. You had more jewellery, earrings lining your lobes and cartilage, rings encircling your fingers; they were all still silver. Your hair had grown; it was still unruly. Your shoes were still dirty. Your smile was the same.
He did notice you eventually, with the fear and reluctance of someone who had noticed, through the corner of their eye, the intense stare of a stranger. And when his gaze landed on you, still shorter than him, still with that wild kindness in your eyes, still with those lips he’d wished he’d gotten to kiss before it was too late, he couldn’t help but soften.
“Hi,” he breathed, and you swore your knees would give out.
“Hi,” you replied, obviously suave and cool and not awkward at all. “How— are you—? Are you good? Well? Are you well?”
He nodded. “Yeah. You?”
“As well as I could be,” you said.
He raised his chin, as if to nod again, but simply kept it there. His eyes flicked somewhere to the right of him, and he said, “Tired from the competition?”
Your eyes widened. “Wha—? How did you—?” You turned to where he was looking outside the shop’s window, and came face to face with a large screen replaying the highlight reels from your routine in Boston. “Oh. That’s— it’s— yeah. A little. Sorry, that’s…” You wrinkled your nose at the sight. “I could’ve gone without seeing that. Again.”
You turned back to look at James, but his eyes were still locked on you. On the screen; a larger than life figure he’d once held securely in his arms, picked up like you’d weighed nothing. A small smile was etched into his features, appearing on his handsome face like watercolour on a canvas. Soft, bleeding through the edges.
“I saw it on the television earlier,” he said. “You did well.”
You couldn’t help grinning. “Yeah? You think?”
“I know. So, what are you in Hong Kong for?”
“Oh, my friend and I are on our way back to Taipei, but we just wanted to make a quick stop here for a day or two. I had to show him where Chungking Express was filmed.”
James chuckled softly. Something that hadn’t changed, he noted. Your obsession with niche films.
“And you?” you asked.
He shut one eye, as if in thought. “I came to visit some family. It was my grandma’s eightieth, so I stayed for the month.”
“Oh, really? That’s great!”
It was a bit of an odd scene, to be honest. Talking to the man you’d had a very passionate, unhealthy, short-lived relationship with as a teenager like you were two friends catching up over coffee. But that’s what you and James were, before everything else. Friends. Begrudging, snappish, eye-rolling friends. Training buddies who spent too much time together. You practically hadn’t seen each other properly for two years, but it was easy to fall back into that dynamic with him.
He nodded, though he didn’t grace you with a direct reply. Instead he said, “Yeah. I’ve been trying to figure things out recently, so I decided staying overseas for a bit would help.”
You paused. “You’re not playing for the Eagles anymore?”
He shook his head.
“You retired?”
“Yeah. I figured I didn’t want to waste my life trying to make something of a sport I didn’t even like that much.”
“But you had the talent for it,” you tried, attempting an encouraging smile.
He returned it in all its gentleness and beauty. “I know. But I’m not you. I can’t lose myself in my passion the way you do. Doesn’t make me any less committed, I just… I guess I realised my talent doesn’t lie in only one thing.”
You hummed softly. “You did? I’m glad.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s helped a lot.”
The silence that enveloped you reminded you of the hospital in Tokyo. It was thick, and filled with the feeling of your guilt. It was your own guilt, of course, nothing projected onto you, nothing brought upon you by anyone by yourself. It was the self-aware sort, the kind people felt when they knew they had sins to answer for, mistakes they’d made, bad decisions they’d left in the gods’ hands.
Your second apology was different from your first one in that you didn’t try to cover all your fronts in one sentence. Instead, you stepped closer to James, effectively grabbing his attention, and said, “I’m sorry I thought less of you because you played hockey.” Then, “I’m sorry I treated you like shit just because I was scared.” And, “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the love you deserved when you so readily gave it to me. I’m sorry I was a bad friend, and a bad girlfriend, and a bad person. I know I was younger, and I was dumber, but that doesn’t make what I did any less… shitty. I was a little asshole, and I deserved your anger for all those years.”
Instead of agreeing with you, curling his lip in anger and telling you off for your wrongdoings, James looked at you like you hung the moon and the stars, wrote the code he lived and loved by. “It’s okay,” he said. “We were just kids.”
“Kids do fucked up shit sometimes,” you protested. “And I did.”
“Still okay.” He noticed the look you were giving him, and added, “That doesn’t mean I’m forgiving you immediately. I’m still furious with you. But, I got my second chance. I’d say it’s only fair you get yours.”
Your brow furrowed in a frown. “Are you saying we should… try again?”
Yufan shrugged. “Why not? Love is more fun the second time round, anyway.” He stepped forward, face inching closer to yours. “As long as I get to have you as my first kiss, because I’ve been waiting for three damn years.”
And who were you to deny him that luxury?
Your first ever kiss happened in a tacky souvenir shop in Hong Kong International Airport, with reels of you playing on a television in the background, and Cantopop drifting through the air as you moulded your body to his, lips slotted together in an embrace that said please don’t let go. Yufan pulled you impossibly closer, his soft lips pressed against yours like a whisper of encouragement for you to get lost in him. Years and years of tension, pent up frustrations, and wishes leaked into the kiss, years of history and years of love that you hadn’t had the heart to receive before you were ready.
“I’m not going to admit it right now,” Yufan said, breaking the kiss only enough that he was murmuring against your lips, though he was going to do just that in the next ten seconds, “but I’ve had the fattest crush on you since I saw you three years ago when you stole my suitcase.”
idol! juhoon x bsf! oc! nabi
genre: smau, crack
synopsis: nabi swears she’s immune to idol juhoon’s charm because she’s known him since before the fame, before the fancams, before the stupid leather jackets.
unfortunately, juhoon keeps acting like a boyfriend by accident.
synopsis: nabi swears she’s immune to idol juhoon’s charm because she’s known him since before the fame, before the fancams, before the stupid leather jackets.
unfortunately, juhoon keeps acting like a boyfriend by accident.
@fshn-zip
filler story lolol cuz im depressed leader not found series got over :( BUT I'LL COME UP W MORE STUFF FOR SURE SO STAY TUNED FAM
cortis!martin x 6th member au
synopsis: starring six people and one deeply exhausted manager.
ep 10: green means stay
previous | next
masterlist
6:41 PM — live broadcast prep
everything’s chaos.
stylists yelling.
staff sprinting.
someone lost an in-ear again.
james is fully horizontal across the couch.
“if i die,” he announces,
“delete my search history and also juhoon.”
“WHAT DID I DO.”
“vibes.”
martin’s fixing schedules on his phone when he hears raised voices near the production monitors.
not angry.
panicked.
two staff members whispering aggressively.
“they sent the wrong file—”
“how do you even make that mistake???”
“we need approval NOW.”
martin barely looks up until one of them says:
“if green sees this we’re dead.”
his head snaps up instantly.
green.
that name again.
the same filename from jade’s studio.
the same weird forum theories.
the same thing sitting in the back of his mind for weeks now.
one staff member notices martin nearby and immediately stops talking.
“…nothing. handled.”
they disappear instantly.
martin stares after them.
his pulse suddenly loud for no reason.
7:03 PM — backstage hallway
martin’s looking for water.
instead he hears music leaking from one of the editing rooms.
a voice.
female.
familiar.
he pauses outside the half-open door.
inside:
three producers.
one sound engineer.
all standing.
not sitting.
standing.
while jade listens to playback with her arms crossed.
nobody speaks until the track ends.
then one producer says carefully:
“we can redo the bridge if you want.”
jade shakes her head once.
“leave it.”
another producer hesitates.
“…green.”
martin’s stomach drops.
the room goes silent instantly.
the producer realizes what he said too late.
jade slowly turns toward the door.
and finds martin standing there.
oh.
oh no.
nobody moves.
martin looks at jade.
jade looks back at him.
the producer next to her looks like he wants to evaporate.
martin speaks first.
quietly.
“…green?”
nobody answers.
then jade sighs once through her nose.
small.
resigned.
“everybody out.”
the room empties in under four seconds.
literally.
grown adults fleeing for their lives.
the door closes.
silence.
martin’s heart is beating so hard it’s embarrassing.
jade leans back against the mixing desk.
for once,
she looks nervous.
actually nervous.
“say something,” she says softly.
martin stares at her.
“you’re green.”
not a question anymore.
jade looks down briefly.
then nods once.
martin actually laughs in disbelief.
not because it’s funny.
because his brain genuinely cannot process this normally.
green.
the green.
the producer.
the ghostwriter.
the industry myth people made conspiracy videos about.
the person credited on songs martin used to listen to before debut.
songs that changed entire careers.
songs everybody knew.
songs he knew.
martin looks at her like he’s seeing her for the first time.
“you wrote…” he starts.
jade nods slightly.
“yeah.”
“all those songs?”
“most of them.”
“when were you planning to tell me this???”
jade shoves her hands into her hoodie pockets.
“ideally never.”
martin stares.
“jade.”
“i know.”
“JADE.”
she winces slightly.
“okay in my defense i genuinely forgot normal people find this alarming.”
“normal peo—”
martin cuts himself off abruptly.
because suddenly everything clicks at once.
the industry reactions.
the fear.
the respect.
chairman cho.
universal.
the hidden files.
the way she heard music.
all of it.
green.
jade.
green.
his stomach drops suddenly.
not because of the producer name anymore.
because—
“green green,” he says quietly.
jade stills instantly.
martin looks at her slowly now.
their album.
the one jade and everyone else practically built from the ground up.
the one centered around artistic freedom, authentic youth, and moving past the restrictive boundaries that stifle creativity.
the one where jade kept insisting on tiny details nobody else noticed mattered.
the one with lyrics that sounded painfully familiar sometimes.
martin remembers the sleepwalking words typed into his laptop days ago.
green smells like rain sometimes
his chest tightens instantly.
oh.
oh my god.
he looks at her like the world just tilted slightly sideways.
“you named the album after yourself?”
jade immediately groans.
“when you say it out loud it sounds psychotic.”
“jade.”
“in my defense it was metaphorical.”
“THAT DOESN’T HELP.”
she covers her face briefly.
“i didn’t think anyone would figure it out.”
martin laughs softly again,
still overwhelmed.
“you literally changed the industry before graduating high school.”
“unfortunately.”
“people are scared of you.”
“that part’s a little funny.”
“you had files named green.”
“martin i was going through something.”
he’s still half overwhelmed,
half fascinated.
because now he’s thinking about every lyric differently.
every production choice.
every strange look jade got whenever certain songs played.
and suddenly the album feels less like a comeback and more like a person.
her.
and weirdly—
the thing that hits him hardest isn’t even the fame.
it’s this:
jade was carrying all of that alone.
the whole time.
while acting like she barely mattered.
martin looks at her quietly now.
“that’s why you looked tired. hell more than i did at times"
jade blinks.
“…what.”
“all the time.”
he steps closer slowly.
“that’s why.”
jade’s expression changes instantly.
because apparently nobody’s ever responded to finding out she’s secretly one of the most influential producers in the industry by looking concerned for her.
the room goes quiet.
martin looks at her carefully.
“that must’ve been lonely.”
jade looks away first.
which almost never happens.
“…yeah,” she admits softly.
martin’s chest physically hurts.
because suddenly he can picture it too clearly:
jade at fifteen.
alone in studios with executives twice her age.
writing songs that would become famous in other people’s voices.
and then going home with nobody allowed to know.
he hates that image immediately.
martin runs a hand through his hair suddenly.
then his eyes narrow.
“wait.”
jade immediately looks suspicious.
“what.”
“the playlist.”
“…martin.”
“YOU HAD A MARTIN-CODED PLAYLIST WHILE SECRETLY BEING A GLOBAL MUSIC STAR?”
jade covers her face instantly.
“oh my god.”
martin starts laughing properly now.
full body laughing.
jade looks horrified.
“this is the worst day of my life.”
“you’re telling me the terrifying ghost producer behind half the industry sat there making playlists about me???”
“i’m leaving.”
she actually turns to walk away.
martin grabs her sleeve instinctively.
jade stops immediately.
their eyes meet.
the laughter fades slowly.
and suddenly the room feels very quiet.
martin’s still holding her sleeve.
neither of them moves.
then softly:
“why didn’t you tell me.”
jade looks at him for a long moment.
honest this time.
completely.
“because people look at me differently after they know.”
martin hears the truth underneath instantly.
people stop seeing her.
they start seeing the legend.
the producer.
the myth.
green.
martin steps a little closer.
still holding her sleeve lightly.
“jade.”
she looks up.
and he says the thing that ruins her instantly:
“i think i liked you before i knew anything.”
silence.
jade actually forgets how to breathe for a second.
martin watches it happen in real time.
her composure completely fractures.
tiny,
but devastating.
“that,” she says after a moment,
voice quieter than usual,
“was a very dangerous sentence.”
“probably.”
“martin.”
“what.”
jade looks at him helplessly for maybe the first time ever.
“you make it really difficult to stay emotionally detached.”
his brain short-circuits instantly.
completely.
fully gone.
martin stares at her like he’s been hit by a truck.
jade realizes what she just admitted approximately two seconds too late.
“…forget i said that.”
“absolutely not.”
“martin.”
“you literally just confessed in corporate language.”
“i hate you.”
“no you don’t.”
jade opens her mouth.
closes it.
because unfortunately,
he’s right.
martin smiles before he can stop himself.
god.
there it is again.
that expression jade keeps looking at like it means something dangerous.
then quietly,
before she can hide again:
“you really liked the playlist?”
martin’s smile softens immediately.
“yeah.”
jade looks weirdly relieved by that.
small.
almost shy.
it hits martin all over again that despite everything—
despite the fame,
the secrecy,
the insane talent—
jade still cared whether he liked the songs she associated with him.
that feels more intimate than anything else somehow.
the hallway outside erupts suddenly.
staff yelling again.
someone running past.
reality returning.
jade sighs softly.
“we should go before people think we died.”
martin still doesn’t let go of her sleeve.
jade looks down at it.
then back at him.
“…martin.”
“hm?”
“you’re holding onto me.”
he blinks.
looks down.
then back up again.
“…yeah.”
small pause.
then quietly:
“i think i want to.”
jade’s expression softens so suddenly it almost hurts to look at.
and this time—
she reaches down,
slides her hand gently into his instead,
and squeezes once.
like she’s answering something.
not a confession.
not yet.
but close enough to ruin both of them anyway.
martin stares at the text for three full seconds.
then immediately walks into the wall beside his bed.
“oh my god,” he whispers.
across the room, juhoon wakes up violently.
“ARE WE UNDER ATTACK?”
“go back to sleep.”
“WHY ARE YOU WHISPERING.”
martin grabs a hoodie.
fast.
too fast.
juhoon narrows his eyes immediately.
“…oh.”
martin freezes.
juhoon slowly sits upright.
“OH.”
“shut up.”
“OH MY GOD.”
“JUHOON.”
the bedroom door swings open suddenly.
james appears looking half dead.
martin points aggressively toward the hallway.
“none of you have jobs.”
“martin’s going to jade’s room at 2 am,” juhoon announces immediately.
dead silence.
then from somewhere down the hall:
“NO WAY.”
seonghyeon.
awake against his will.
martin looks genuinely devastated now.
“you people are parasites.”
keonho opens his bedroom door slightly.
hair destroyed.
one eye closed.
“…did he finally lose.”
“HE LOST,” james confirms instantly.
martin leaves before they can say anything else.
behind him:
“WAIT ASK IF THEY NEED SNACKS.”
“JAMES WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.”
martin suddenly realizes he has no idea why she asked him here.
his heartbeat’s ridiculous again.
he knocks once.
quietly.
the door opens almost immediately.
jade’s standing there in oversized black sweats,
hair messy,
looking unfairly soft for 2 am.
martin forgets every language instantly.
jade leans against the doorway.
“…you walked here suspiciously fast.”
she steps aside silently.
martin walks in.
and immediately stops.
jade’s room is—
warm.
lamps instead of overhead lights.
vinyls stacked beside speakers.
hoodies over chairs.
half-written lyrics scattered across the desk.
there’s a tiny plant by the window that honestly looks healthier than all of cortis combined.
martin looks around carefully.
this feels weirdly intimate.
like being let inside her head a little.
jade notices him staring at the records.
“don’t judge me.”
“you own physical cds in 2026.”
“music deserves whimsy.”
“you sound ninety years old.”
“and yet.”
martin smiles softly.
jade watches him for a second too long again.
then looks away first.
interesting.
she walks over to the desk,
opens her laptop,
then hesitates.
which immediately gets martin’s attention.
jade never hesitates.
“…what.”
she looks weirdly uncomfortable suddenly.
“this is humiliating.”
“that sentence has never stopped you before.”
“true.”
jade sighs dramatically.
then turns the laptop around.
the playlist.
the actual martin-coded playlist.
martin looks at it quietly.
the songs.
the descriptions.
the timestamps.
some added months ago.
before debut.
before they were even close.
his chest tightens instantly.
because suddenly he understands something terrible:
jade noticed him long before he realized she was looking.
he scrolls slowly.
there are notes beside some songs.
small ones.
reminds me of the way he checks if everyone ate first
sounds like someone pretending they aren’t tired
this is what his laugh feels like at 3am
martin genuinely stops breathing for a second.
jade immediately looks away.
“…i can explain.”
“i don’t think you can actually. not anymore.”
“that’s fair.” she says defeated.
martin looks back at the screen.
heart beating way too hard now.
because nobody’s ever observed him this gently before.
not like this.
not down to the smallest details.
his throat feels strangely tight suddenly.
“jade.”
she hums quietly without looking at him.
“this is insane.”
“i’m aware.”
“you made an emotional research document.”
“that sounds much less romantic.”
martin looks up immediately.
jade freezes.
oh.
oh she heard herself too.
their eyes meet.
jade blinks once.
then calmly closes the laptop.
“well.”
martin’s smiling now.
helplessly.
“romantic?”
“i’m deleting the playlist.”
he laughs quietly.
jade looks at him again then,
and something in her expression softens almost painfully.
“you really didn’t know?” she asks softly.
“know what.”
“that i…”
she stops.
restarts.
“…like being around you.”
martin stares at her.
because somehow,
despite everything,
that feels bigger than all the green stuff combined.
jade notices his expression and immediately looks concerned.
“why do you look you got hit by a bus.”
“give me a second.”
“martin.”
“you made me a forty-three song profile.”
“forty-six actually.”
“JADE.”
she laughs before she can stop herself.
full laugh this time.
completely unguarded.
martin just watches her for a second.
completely gone.
and jade notices that too.
her laughter fades slowly.
the room goes quiet.
not awkward.
worse.
the kind of silence where both people suddenly become aware of everything.
how close they’re standing.
how late it is.
how badly this could ruin them.
martin looks at her carefully.
“can i ask something.”
jade nods once.
“when did you start making the playlist.”
small pause.
then:
“…tokyo.”
martin stills instantly.
tokyo.
that night. of course.
the breakdown.
the security chaos.
the sleepwalking.
jade looks down briefly.
“you looked exhausted,” she says quietly.
“like you were trying to carry an entire building by yourself.”
martin’s chest aches immediately.
“and then afterwards,” jade continues softly,
“you thanked every staff member before sitting on the hallway floor and falling asleep for twenty minutes.”
martin laughs weakly through his nose.
“that sounds depressing.”
“it was kind of pathetic actually.”
“wow.”
“but also…”
she hesitates.
martin waits quietly.
jade looks at him finally.
completely honest now.
“…i think that was the first time someone made me want to stay.”
the air leaves martin’s lungs all at once.
jade realizes how real that sounded approximately two seconds too late.
her expression immediately shifts into regret.
“forget i said that.”
martin steps closer before he can even think about it.
“no.”
jade looks up.
his voice comes out quieter now.
careful.
“don’t take that back.”
something in jade’s expression breaks a little at that.
cortis!martin x 6th member au
synopsis: starring six people and one deeply exhausted manager.
ep 10: green means stay
previous | next
masterlist
6:41 PM — live broadcast prep
everything’s chaos.
stylists yelling.
staff sprinting.
someone lost an in-ear again.
james is fully horizontal across the couch.
“if i die,” he announces,
“delete my search history and also juhoon.”
“WHAT DID I DO.”
“vibes.”
martin’s fixing schedules on his phone when he hears raised voices near the production monitors.
not angry.
panicked.
two staff members whispering aggressively.
“they sent the wrong file—”
“how do you even make that mistake???”
“we need approval NOW.”
martin barely looks up until one of them says:
“if green sees this we’re dead.”
his head snaps up instantly.
green.
that name again.
the same filename from jade’s studio.
the same weird forum theories.
the same thing sitting in the back of his mind for weeks now.
one staff member notices martin nearby and immediately stops talking.
“…nothing. handled.”
they disappear instantly.
martin stares after them.
his pulse suddenly loud for no reason.
7:03 PM — backstage hallway
martin’s looking for water.
instead he hears music leaking from one of the editing rooms.
a voice.
female.
familiar.
he pauses outside the half-open door.
inside:
three producers.
one sound engineer.
all standing.
not sitting.
standing.
while jade listens to playback with her arms crossed.
nobody speaks until the track ends.
then one producer says carefully:
“we can redo the bridge if you want.”
jade shakes her head once.
“leave it.”
another producer hesitates.
“…green.”
martin’s stomach drops.
the room goes silent instantly.
the producer realizes what he said too late.
jade slowly turns toward the door.
and finds martin standing there.
oh.
oh no.
nobody moves.
martin looks at jade.
jade looks back at him.
the producer next to her looks like he wants to evaporate.
martin speaks first.
quietly.
“…green?”
nobody answers.
then jade sighs once through her nose.
small.
resigned.
“everybody out.”
the room empties in under four seconds.
literally.
grown adults fleeing for their lives.
the door closes.
silence.
martin’s heart is beating so hard it’s embarrassing.
jade leans back against the mixing desk.
for once,
she looks nervous.
actually nervous.
“say something,” she says softly.
martin stares at her.
“you’re green.”
not a question anymore.
jade looks down briefly.
then nods once.
martin actually laughs in disbelief.
not because it’s funny.
because his brain genuinely cannot process this normally.
green.
the green.
the producer.
the ghostwriter.
the industry myth people made conspiracy videos about.
the person credited on songs martin used to listen to before debut.
songs that changed entire careers.
songs everybody knew.
songs he knew.
martin looks at her like he’s seeing her for the first time.
“you wrote…” he starts.
jade nods slightly.
“yeah.”
“all those songs?”
“most of them.”
“when were you planning to tell me this???”
jade shoves her hands into her hoodie pockets.
“ideally never.”
martin stares.
“jade.”
“i know.”
“JADE.”
she winces slightly.
“okay in my defense i genuinely forgot normal people find this alarming.”
“normal peo—”
martin cuts himself off abruptly.
because suddenly everything clicks at once.
the industry reactions.
the fear.
the respect.
chairman cho.
universal.
the hidden files.
the way she heard music.
all of it.
green.
jade.
green.
his stomach drops suddenly.
not because of the producer name anymore.
because—
“green green,” he says quietly.
jade stills instantly.
martin looks at her slowly now.
their album.
the one jade and everyone else practically built from the ground up.
the one centered around artistic freedom, authentic youth, and moving past the restrictive boundaries that stifle creativity.
the one where jade kept insisting on tiny details nobody else noticed mattered.
the one with lyrics that sounded painfully familiar sometimes.
martin remembers the sleepwalking words typed into his laptop days ago.
green smells like rain sometimes
his chest tightens instantly.
oh.
oh my god.
he looks at her like the world just tilted slightly sideways.
“you named the album after yourself?”
jade immediately groans.
“when you say it out loud it sounds psychotic.”
“jade.”
“in my defense it was metaphorical.”
“THAT DOESN’T HELP.”
she covers her face briefly.
“i didn’t think anyone would figure it out.”
martin laughs softly again,
still overwhelmed.
“you literally changed the industry before graduating high school.”
“unfortunately.”
“people are scared of you.”
“that part’s a little funny.”
“you had files named green.”
“martin i was going through something.”
he’s still half overwhelmed,
half fascinated.
because now he’s thinking about every lyric differently.
every production choice.
every strange look jade got whenever certain songs played.
and suddenly the album feels less like a comeback and more like a person.
her.
and weirdly—
the thing that hits him hardest isn’t even the fame.
it’s this:
jade was carrying all of that alone.
the whole time.
while acting like she barely mattered.
martin looks at her quietly now.
“that’s why you looked tired. hell more than i did at times"
jade blinks.
“…what.”
“all the time.”
he steps closer slowly.
“that’s why.”
jade’s expression changes instantly.
because apparently nobody’s ever responded to finding out she’s secretly one of the most influential producers in the industry by looking concerned for her.
the room goes quiet.
martin looks at her carefully.
“that must’ve been lonely.”
jade looks away first.
which almost never happens.
“…yeah,” she admits softly.
martin’s chest physically hurts.
because suddenly he can picture it too clearly:
jade at fifteen.
alone in studios with executives twice her age.
writing songs that would become famous in other people’s voices.
and then going home with nobody allowed to know.
he hates that image immediately.
martin runs a hand through his hair suddenly.
then his eyes narrow.
“wait.”
jade immediately looks suspicious.
“what.”
“the playlist.”
“…martin.”
“YOU HAD A MARTIN-CODED PLAYLIST WHILE SECRETLY BEING A GLOBAL MUSIC STAR?”
jade covers her face instantly.
“oh my god.”
martin starts laughing properly now.
full body laughing.
jade looks horrified.
“this is the worst day of my life.”
“you’re telling me the terrifying ghost producer behind half the industry sat there making playlists about me???”
“i’m leaving.”
she actually turns to walk away.
martin grabs her sleeve instinctively.
jade stops immediately.
their eyes meet.
the laughter fades slowly.
and suddenly the room feels very quiet.
martin’s still holding her sleeve.
neither of them moves.
then softly:
“why didn’t you tell me.”
jade looks at him for a long moment.
honest this time.
completely.
“because people look at me differently after they know.”
martin hears the truth underneath instantly.
people stop seeing her.
they start seeing the legend.
the producer.
the myth.
green.
martin steps a little closer.
still holding her sleeve lightly.
“jade.”
she looks up.
and he says the thing that ruins her instantly:
“i think i liked you before i knew anything.”
silence.
jade actually forgets how to breathe for a second.
martin watches it happen in real time.
her composure completely fractures.
tiny,
but devastating.
“that,” she says after a moment,
voice quieter than usual,
“was a very dangerous sentence.”
“probably.”
“martin.”
“what.”
jade looks at him helplessly for maybe the first time ever.
“you make it really difficult to stay emotionally detached.”
his brain short-circuits instantly.
completely.
fully gone.
martin stares at her like he’s been hit by a truck.
jade realizes what she just admitted approximately two seconds too late.
“…forget i said that.”
“absolutely not.”
“martin.”
“you literally just confessed in corporate language.”
“i hate you.”
“no you don’t.”
jade opens her mouth.
closes it.
because unfortunately,
he’s right.
martin smiles before he can stop himself.
god.
there it is again.
that expression jade keeps looking at like it means something dangerous.
then quietly,
before she can hide again:
“you really liked the playlist?”
martin’s smile softens immediately.
“yeah.”
jade looks weirdly relieved by that.
small.
almost shy.
it hits martin all over again that despite everything—
despite the fame,
the secrecy,
the insane talent—
jade still cared whether he liked the songs she associated with him.
that feels more intimate than anything else somehow.
the hallway outside erupts suddenly.
staff yelling again.
someone running past.
reality returning.
jade sighs softly.
“we should go before people think we died.”
martin still doesn’t let go of her sleeve.
jade looks down at it.
then back at him.
“…martin.”
“hm?”
“you’re holding onto me.”
he blinks.
looks down.
then back up again.
“…yeah.”
small pause.
then quietly:
“i think i want to.”
jade’s expression softens so suddenly it almost hurts to look at.
and this time—
she reaches down,
slides her hand gently into his instead,
and squeezes once.
like she’s answering something.
not a confession.
not yet.
but close enough to ruin both of them anyway.
martin stares at the text for three full seconds.
then immediately walks into the wall beside his bed.
“oh my god,” he whispers.
across the room, juhoon wakes up violently.
“ARE WE UNDER ATTACK?”
“go back to sleep.”
“WHY ARE YOU WHISPERING.”
martin grabs a hoodie.
fast.
too fast.
juhoon narrows his eyes immediately.
“…oh.”
martin freezes.
juhoon slowly sits upright.
“OH.”
“shut up.”
“OH MY GOD.”
“JUHOON.”
the bedroom door swings open suddenly.
james appears looking half dead.
martin points aggressively toward the hallway.
“none of you have jobs.”
“martin’s going to jade’s room at 2 am,” juhoon announces immediately.
dead silence.
then from somewhere down the hall:
“NO WAY.”
seonghyeon.
awake against his will.
martin looks genuinely devastated now.
“you people are parasites.”
keonho opens his bedroom door slightly.
hair destroyed.
one eye closed.
“…did he finally lose.”
“HE LOST,” james confirms instantly.
martin leaves before they can say anything else.
behind him:
“WAIT ASK IF THEY NEED SNACKS.”
“JAMES WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.”
martin suddenly realizes he has no idea why she asked him here.
his heartbeat’s ridiculous again.
he knocks once.
quietly.
the door opens almost immediately.
jade’s standing there in oversized black sweats,
hair messy,
looking unfairly soft for 2 am.
martin forgets every language instantly.
jade leans against the doorway.
“…you walked here suspiciously fast.”
she steps aside silently.
martin walks in.
and immediately stops.
jade’s room is—
warm.
lamps instead of overhead lights.
vinyls stacked beside speakers.
hoodies over chairs.
half-written lyrics scattered across the desk.
there’s a tiny plant by the window that honestly looks healthier than all of cortis combined.
martin looks around carefully.
this feels weirdly intimate.
like being let inside her head a little.
jade notices him staring at the records.
“don’t judge me.”
“you own physical cds in 2026.”
“music deserves whimsy.”
“you sound ninety years old.”
“and yet.”
martin smiles softly.
jade watches him for a second too long again.
then looks away first.
interesting.
she walks over to the desk,
opens her laptop,
then hesitates.
which immediately gets martin’s attention.
jade never hesitates.
“…what.”
she looks weirdly uncomfortable suddenly.
“this is humiliating.”
“that sentence has never stopped you before.”
“true.”
jade sighs dramatically.
then turns the laptop around.
the playlist.
the actual martin-coded playlist.
martin looks at it quietly.
the songs.
the descriptions.
the timestamps.
some added months ago.
before debut.
before they were even close.
his chest tightens instantly.
because suddenly he understands something terrible:
jade noticed him long before he realized she was looking.
he scrolls slowly.
there are notes beside some songs.
small ones.
reminds me of the way he checks if everyone ate first
sounds like someone pretending they aren’t tired
this is what his laugh feels like at 3am
martin genuinely stops breathing for a second.
jade immediately looks away.
“…i can explain.”
“i don’t think you can actually. not anymore.”
“that’s fair.” she says defeated.
martin looks back at the screen.
heart beating way too hard now.
because nobody’s ever observed him this gently before.
not like this.
not down to the smallest details.
his throat feels strangely tight suddenly.
“jade.”
she hums quietly without looking at him.
“this is insane.”
“i’m aware.”
“you made an emotional research document.”
“that sounds much less romantic.”
martin looks up immediately.
jade freezes.
oh.
oh she heard herself too.
their eyes meet.
jade blinks once.
then calmly closes the laptop.
“well.”
martin’s smiling now.
helplessly.
“romantic?”
“i’m deleting the playlist.”
he laughs quietly.
jade looks at him again then,
and something in her expression softens almost painfully.
“you really didn’t know?” she asks softly.
“know what.”
“that i…”
she stops.
restarts.
“…like being around you.”
martin stares at her.
because somehow,
despite everything,
that feels bigger than all the green stuff combined.
jade notices his expression and immediately looks concerned.
“why do you look you got hit by a bus.”
“give me a second.”
“martin.”
“you made me a forty-three song profile.”
“forty-six actually.”
“JADE.”
she laughs before she can stop herself.
full laugh this time.
completely unguarded.
martin just watches her for a second.
completely gone.
and jade notices that too.
her laughter fades slowly.
the room goes quiet.
not awkward.
worse.
the kind of silence where both people suddenly become aware of everything.
how close they’re standing.
how late it is.
how badly this could ruin them.
martin looks at her carefully.
“can i ask something.”
jade nods once.
“when did you start making the playlist.”
small pause.
then:
“…tokyo.”
martin stills instantly.
tokyo.
that night. of course.
the breakdown.
the security chaos.
the sleepwalking.
jade looks down briefly.
“you looked exhausted,” she says quietly.
“like you were trying to carry an entire building by yourself.”
martin’s chest aches immediately.
“and then afterwards,” jade continues softly,
“you thanked every staff member before sitting on the hallway floor and falling asleep for twenty minutes.”
martin laughs weakly through his nose.
“that sounds depressing.”
“it was kind of pathetic actually.”
“wow.”
“but also…”
she hesitates.
martin waits quietly.
jade looks at him finally.
completely honest now.
“…i think that was the first time someone made me want to stay.”
the air leaves martin’s lungs all at once.
jade realizes how real that sounded approximately two seconds too late.
her expression immediately shifts into regret.
“forget i said that.”
martin steps closer before he can even think about it.
“no.”
jade looks up.
his voice comes out quieter now.
careful.
“don’t take that back.”
something in jade’s expression breaks a little at that.
cortis!martin x 6th member au synopsis: starring six people and one deeply exhausted manager.
ep 8: insomnia activities
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when martin walked into the kitchen ten minutes later, jade was sitting on the counter in oversized sweats eating strawberries straight from the container.
again.
nobody questioned where she kept getting premium strawberries at 1 am anymore.
the answer was probably money.
or crime.
“you actually came,” she said.
martin grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge.
“you invited me.”
“yeah but i figured you’d choose work over human interaction.”
“that’s fair honestly.”
jade snorted softly.
quiet settled around them naturally after that.
not awkward.
which honestly felt worse somehow.
because martin was getting too comfortable around her now.
jade held the strawberry container out toward him without looking.
martin took one automatically.
jade burst out laughing.
head tilted down slightly, shoulders shaking.
martin stared for half a second too long.
because every time she laughed it felt weirdly rare.
like spotting a shooting star or a functional hybe employee.
jade looked up suddenly.
caught him staring immediately.
“why are you looking at me like that.”
martin looked away so fast it almost gave him whiplash.
“wasn’t.”
“liar.”
“you’re impossible.”
martin opened the fridge again despite not needing anything from it.
purely for emotional support.
behind him, jade was visibly trying not to laugh harder.
then she said quietly:
“well you look less miserable today.”
martin closed the fridge slowly.
“…that might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“don’t get used to it.”
“devastating.”
she smiled a little at that.
martin’s heartbeat immediately started acting unemployed.
then james appeared in the hallway.
completely still.
watching them.
james looked at martin.
then jade.
then the strawberries.
then back to martin.
“…oh my god.”
martin closed his eyes.
“go away.”
“THIS IS A KITCHEN SCENE.”
“please shut up.”
“YOU GUYS ARE STANDING THERE LIKE AN INDIE ALBUM COVER HOW CAN I GO AWAY YALL COME HERE LOOK AT THIS.”
jade looked entirely unbothered.
“why are you awake.”
“i sensed yearning in the atmosphere.”
“horrific sentence.”
unfortunately the noise woke everyone else up too.
within two minutes the hallway was full.
juhoon squinting suspiciously.
keonho wrapped in a blanket like a grandmother.
seonghyeon looking moments away from murder.
“why are you all like this,” martin asked weakly.
“why are YOU in the kitchen at 1 am with jade and emotional lighting,” juhoon shot back.
“emotional lighting is insane,” jade muttered.
keonho pointed at the strawberries.
“seriously where do these come from.”
jade took another bite calmly.
“connections.”
“that answer explained nothing.”
then juhoon froze suddenly.
everyone looked at him.
“what,” martin said cautiously.
juhoon blinked slowly.
“you guys actually enjoy talking to each other. damn damn.”
martin stopped moving.
jade stopped chewing.
then james screamed like he’d discovered evidence of extraterrestrial life.
“OH MY GOD.”
“we’re leaving,” martin announced immediately.
“WE?????” james yelled.
too late.
martin had already grabbed the strawberry container while jade slid off the counter beside him.
they walked away together while the members screamed behind them like traumatized zoo animals.
the rooftop was cold and quiet.
city lights glowing below them.
for a while they just sat there passing strawberries back and forth silently.
comfortable.
easy.
martin hadn’t realized how badly he needed easy.
then jade looked over.
“they’re gonna bully us tomorrow.”
martin laughed softly.
“yeah.”
“you hate it?”
he thought about it honestly.
then shook his head.
“not really.”
jade looked surprised by the answer.
martin rested his arms on his knees.
“they haven’t laughed this much in weeks.”
something about that hit her hard.
because even exhausted, even burnt out, even barely sleeping—
martin still measured his own happiness through everyone else first.
jade looked at him quietly for a second.
then said:
“you really love them.”
martin smiled a little.
“yeah.”
small pause.
then:
“including you.”
jade genuinely forgot how breathing worked.
completely.
martin realized what he’d said about three seconds too late.
his eyes widened immediately.
“i meant—”
“i know what you meant,” jade said quickly.
except the problem was—
she wasn’t entirely sure she did.
martin realized two things halfway through sitting on the rooftop with jade.
one:
he was smiling too much around her lately.
two:
jade never answered questions directly.
ever.
“including you,” he’d said.
normal sentence.
completely survivable sentence.
except jade looked like somebody had unplugged her soul for half a second afterward.
now she was aggressively focused on the skyline instead.
eating strawberries like they personally offended her.
martin glanced sideways at her.
“…you good.”
“fantastic.”
“you look stressed.”
“that’s just my face.”
“fair.”
jade snorted softly.
tiny victory.
martin was beginning to collect those.
little reactions.
small laughs.
eye rolls.
pieces of her that didn’t show up in public.
he liked them too much already.
dangerous situation overall.
his phone buzzed.
jade peeked at martin’s screen.
then immediately started laughing.
“they think we’re on a date.”
martin looked at her.
looked away.
looked back again.
“…they’re stupid.”
jade’s eyebrow lifted slightly.
“that sounded hesitant.”
martin nearly threw his phone off the roof.
“you make conversations feel like hostage situations.”
“skill issue.”
quiet settled again after that.
comfortable.
wind brushing lightly past them.
city lights below.
for once martin’s brain wasn’t screaming at him about schedules or charts or expectations.
