His laugh echoes through the apartment, rich and booming, and for a moment, the tiredness fades from his eyes.
“I’ll be back late. You can have anything in the fridge.”
He slips on his shoes, ready to go, but glances back at me with a playful grin. “Don’t snoop.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
The smirk he gives me says he doesn’t believe that for a second. Then he’s gone, the door clicking shut behind him.
I drift toward the living room windows, huge glass panels framing the Seoul skyline. The city still feels half-asleep, but dawn is breaking—pink and orange bleeding into the horizon.
My phone stays off in my pocket, a small, cold weight. I can’t turn it on. I’m not ready to see Shin’s name. Not yet.
Instead, I retreat to Suho’s bedroom and sink onto the bed. His pillow smells of him—a dangerous, intoxicating cocktail of warm, clean skin and that faint cedar note he’s worn for years. I breathe it in, letting it sink into me like something I shouldn’t want, but always do.
A few hours later, I wake with a pounding heart. No dreams—just that heavy, jet-lag-from-your-own-life kind of grogginess.
I make a cup of coffee and start wandering—fingers drifting over framed group photos, pausing at the scuff mark on the coffee table from a nightyears ago when we’d been too drunk to care, grazing the spines of his books.
Most are scripts or biographies, but one catches my eye. It’s a thick, moody-looking art book titledLos Angeles: A City in Monochrome.It’s the kind of expensive, declarative object that sits on a coffee table as a piece of decor, a statement.
I pull it from the shelf, its weight heavy in my hands. As I flip through the stark, black-and-white photos of empty freeways and palm tree silhouettes, something slips out from between the pages and flutters to the floor.
It’s a flash of jarring, unapologetic pink. An anomaly in his perfectly curated grayscale world.
I pick it up. A postcard. The front is a single, perfect sakura blossom—a cherry tree in full, brilliant bloom. The back is completely blank.
And the memory hits me, uninvited and unwelcome, an old file loading with perfect, painful clarity.
Us, years ago, crammed into a tiny practice room late at night, exhausted and giddy, whispering about a future that felt like a distant, impossible planet.
“If you weren’t an idol, what would you be?” I’d asked him.
He’d been quiet for a long time, staring at the ceiling. “Normal,” he’d finally said. “I’d live in Los Angeles, near my dad. I’d have a small house. With a cherry tree in the backyard.” He’d looked at me then, a rare, unguarded softness in his eyes. “And you’d be there.”
I had laughed, a sound that was probably a little too loud, a little too brittle. I’d told him we were too wild for that kind of quiet, domestic dream.
And just like that, the cynical, world-weary director in my head yells, ‘Cut!’
The scene is too sweet. Too sentimental. It belongs in a different movie, a different life. That version of us—the one who whispered about picket fences and cherry trees—never existed. He was a fantasy, a character in a script we never got to write.
It’s a dangerous thought, a piece of sentimental malware that has no place in the operating system of our current, chaotic reality.
I shove the postcard back between the moody, monochrome pages and slide the book back onto the shelf, closing the cover on a life we were never allowed to have.
Yeah. No. I’ve fallen for that daydream one too many times. I’m a grown-up now. I know better than to choke on that kind of empty hope again.
I curl up on the couch, knees tucked in. My phone sits facedown beside me. I don’t dare turn it over. I know Shin is looking for me; the thought presses against my ribs like a weight.
Eventually, I take a deep breath and unlock it. The screen is an avalanche of notifications I don’t have the energy for. I ignore them all—except one.
From Suho:I know you won’t eat unless someone nags you. My assistant left food at the door.
A small, tired smile tugs at my lips.Cute. But I’m not hungry.
Instead, I open a new message and send a single, guilt-ridden text to Shin:Don’t worry about me.Then I shove the phone between the couch cushions as if it’s radioactive and pretend it doesn’t exist.
The silence in the apartment is deafening. I pace for a while, drumming my fingers on the back of the sofa, wondering how to kill time while avoiding the two landmines in the room: my phoneand the TV. The last thing I need is to stumble onto a gossip channel and see my own face.
