The Comeback, page 15
Alex wordlessly points to a closed door. His expression is easy to decipher: You poor bastard. Jihoon reads it as well as I do, and his face squinches up in a way I would have found charming an hour ago but am now too angry to acknowledge. I blow through the door without waiting. Jihoon follows and shuts the door carefully behind him, blocking it as if worried I’ll try to escape. No fear of that because no one’s leaving until I get the full story.
“You even lied about your name, Min.”
He stares at the floor. “Technically not, as Min is my stage name.”
“You know what? You can have your technicality because I have a fine collection of your other lies to choose from. You’re a singer. A famous one, according to Alex.”
He looks trapped but nods slowly. “Yes. An idol with StarLune.”
Idol. It blows my mind that’s even a real job title, but professional nomenclature is not the apex issue of my problem pyramid. “Kit and Daehyun aren’t buddies here on a work trip. They’re your world-famous celebrity bandmates.”
He struggles with that for a moment before admitting defeat. “They are.”
“What else didn’t you tell me?” I sag against the desk. “You fed me such a monumental pile of bull. I guess you wanted to know what it was like to be a regular person for once. A good joke.”
“No!” He reaches out but freezes when I lean back, shaking my head. “Never, Ari. I swear I wanted to tell you.”
“How convenient now that you’ve been caught.” I try to pull back the bitterness in my voice, but I can’t.
Jihoon—Min…whoever the hell he is—passes a hand over his face. “It’s like when you don’t know someone’s name and then too much time passes to ask.”
“Those are not close to being comparable experiences. You could have told me at any time in the past month. You could have told me yesterday.”
“What, while we were making coffee after dinner? Just, ‘Yah, Ari, this slipped my memory, but I’m actually an idol. The men in the living room are members of my band. Pass the sugar.’”
I’m already on a new thought, because unlike my focused and linear work self, this self is leaping all over the place. “How about when we were watching the video you were in?” I groan. “How could I have not recognized you?”
“I have a very different presence when performing, and we had creative styling,” he says primly. “Also you were mostly looking at Kit.”
That’s undeniable, but I can’t even go there right now. “You lied to me.”
“I know.” He looks me in the eyes. “Every time I tried, the words choked me. I knew you would be angry. I wanted to keep you safe, too.”
“Safe?”
Jihoon sits down on the chair, a calming gray tweed woven through with delicate red threads. “It’s hard for idols to date. Some fans get upset, and it’s a struggle to keep a partner’s identity private. There’s a lot of pressure and scrutiny that I wanted to avoid for you.”
I gloss over the part where he considered us either dating or about to date because that’s a whole other conversation. “It should be my choice to make.”
“No.”
My eyelashes tangle together with how hard I squint at him. “What did you say?”
“How can you make a choice not knowing the facts?” He rubs the back of his neck. “I can tell you what it’s like, but that’s nothing compared to the experience of always being watched.”
“You’re conflating telling me and telling the world,” I snap. “It’s not like I would say anything.”
The silence lasts a beat too long.
“Whoa,” I breathe. “You thought I was going to rat you out. That’s why you were so standoffish when you arrived. I thought you were shy.” How dense am I?
“No, no! Hana trusts you, and I only wanted to get to know you first. As Jihoon, not Min of StarLune.” He looks at me piteously. “I was going to tell you tonight, I swear I was.”
“Noble of you.” I’m allowed to be snippy. It hurts that he played me for a fool, but Huis don’t do feelings talk, and I’m not about to break the family tradition. Time to focus on cold, hard plans. “What’s going to happen now?”
He seems relieved to get onto solid facts, which is probably an indication of how stressed he is. “Newlight has teams monitoring coverage,” he says. “Alex is checking every place we’ve been together in Toronto and having them sign NDAs.”
This will be part of my job when I start with Hyphen, but the irony doesn’t make me smile. “You didn’t get recognized for a month.”
“I was very careful, and no one knew I was away from Seoul at first. It was bad luck I knocked my hat off in the store.”
I tick through our time together. “You shopped with a credit card.”
“It’s issued in another name.”
So cloak-and-dagger. A gleefully small-minded thought occurs to me. “Mrs. Choi will know you were here and didn’t go to see her.”
He winces. “I can’t believe I’m not even concerned about that, although it will cause a family fuss worthy of a television drama.” He pauses. “I can make this up to you, Ari.”
“Yeah? How?” I wait while he works on a response, because of course he can’t. I’m not even sure why I’m here talking to him. I should tell him where he can stuff his StarLune and cut off all contact.
I get up and look out the window. We’re in a luxury penthouse condo on Avenue Road that Alex assured me was better for security than a hotel. To the south is the crystal architecture of the Royal Ontario Museum, and I get a wave of nostalgia so intense, it almost makes me gasp. Ten-year-old Ari only had to worry about spelling pterodactyl correctly on her worksheet. She couldn’t even fathom the shit that would go down twenty years later.
Jihoon hasn’t replied before I speak again. “Were you planning to ghost me? Go back to your rock star life without saying anything?”
“No, never.”
Jihoon sounds sincere. “Why did you lie about an ex?”
“Hana said I was too unhappy to simply appear without a reason, and it seemed most plausible. The sentiment was close enough.”
“I want the full story. All of it.” I want to believe him, but honestly, he’s not giving me a lot of runway.
He sits on the bed and crumples the duvet in his hand. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Try the beginning.”
Jihoon releases the duvet and smooths the wrinkles out with a pensive expression. “Do you know how many hotels I’ve stayed in?”
“No.”
“Hundreds. For almost a full year, we lived out of hotels. I’m in hotels more than my own room.”
I’m not sure if this is leading somewhere or if I’m about to get a Tripadvisor summary. That’s a lot of hotels, but hotels are relaxing except for those jacuzzi tubs I’m sure are never clean enough around the jets.
“I’ve been with StarLune for more than a decade,” he says, frowning down at his hands. “The best years of my life. I’m alive when I write songs that fans treasure. The members are my family.”
I wait.
Jihoon plants his elbows on his knees and bends so he’s talking to the floor. “It’s hard to be an idol. There’s fame and money and performing. There’s also no privacy. I can’t breathe without a camera in my face. We do interviews and concerts and fan signings, and I don’t even know what else. Every day I get a schedule, and I obey it like a robot.”
“What happened?”
He looks up at me. “Our last show was Seoul Olympic Stadium. Do you know it?”
I shake my head.
He smiles at his hands. “It’s a dream for idol bands. It means you’re big enough to sell out a stadium instead of arenas. Almost fifty thousand people each show. It was a triumph.”
“You don’t sound like it was.”
“I nearly couldn’t go onstage for the last one.” He wrinkles his nose and looks out the window, gaze dark. “It’s always organized chaos before a performance. Everything gets checked three, four times. Backups on backups. Plans B and C and D because there’s millions of dollars on the line for those three hours of expected perfection. Hundreds of staff members work hard so the five of us can shine for our fans the way we want to.”
“What do you mean you couldn’t go on?”
“I forgot the words to our first song. I forgot our choreo. My mind was a blank. My earpiece was feeding me gibberish because I couldn’t make sense of the sounds. The show was starting, and I didn’t know the words. I was going to forget everything. Every time I tried to remember, the knowledge seemed further away. I was going to fail everyone. The fans. My members.” He’s speaking faster now, and I’m a little scared.
I make myself blink because my eyes are so wide, they’re drying out. “Then what?”
Jihoon jumps up and leans against the wall before starting to pace the room with jerky steps. “Kit saw my face, and he knew. He grabbed me, hard, and he hit me.”
“He what?” This isn’t what I expected.
He touches his right cheek as if reliving the blow. “He slapped me and told me to get it together. Then he made me breathe with him. Gave me oxygen. He tried every technique he could in twenty seconds as the crowd screamed from the other side.”
I take a deep breath, tense even from hearing this. “Did it work?”
Jihoon looks distant, as if he were back on that stage. “I did the show, and no one complained. I went back to my apartment, and it was cold because I was meant to be in a hotel to celebrate the end of a successful tour. I couldn’t remember a single minute. On the best night of my career, I sat on my floor and wondered if it was all worth it. All those cheers and I was alone, knowing none of that was for Jihoon. Only Min.”
I stay quiet because although most of me—almost all of me—feels intense pity, the nasty and vindictive part thinks, Isn’t this what you signed up for? Boo-hoo, it’s so hard at the top. People would kill for that.
“Some other things happened then, and I had enough. We had two weeks off, and I told the others I needed more time. They covered for me as long as they could, until the company found out I was gone and they had to come get me. They’re furious.”
“Tell them you need a break. Why all the sneaking around?”
“We have a comeback soon.”
“I don’t know what that is.” There’s a coin in my pocket, and I absently take it out to spin on the table before I start to fidget with it.
“An album release. That means practices every day to learn the choreography. Rehearsals for music shows. Interview prep and photo shoots. People everywhere. Cameras.” He gives a wry smile. “They once filmed me having a nap on a couch for five minutes. Half my face is covered with a hoodie. It has twenty million views.”
“That’s a lot.” How invasive. Yet he allowed it, so part of him must enjoy it even though he’s protesting now.
“It makes the fans happy, and that’s the most important thing to us.”
“You left, though.”
“All I could think about was what if next time there’s a stage and I can’t get on it? What if I had forgotten the words or messed up the choreo during the show? What if my songs never get…” Here, he falters. “It was paralyzing.”
I can sympathize with this performance anxiety, even if I experience it on a much less public level.
“Then a text came from Hana.” He sees my face. “We text a lot.”
“She never even told me you existed.”
The coin gets away from me, and he rolls it back. “That’s my fault. My company’s fault, but they did it to keep Hana’s family safe.”
“That’s for her and I to talk about.”
He continues, “Hana said she was going out of town. I didn’t even think. I asked if I could stay at her place and left Seoul.”
“Without telling anyone.”
“I told the members where I would be but not the company. I needed to think.”
Living with his heart for sure. “About what, exactly?”
“My path.” His pinched lips and curved neck make it clear he doesn’t want to talk about it. That’s fine, because in the end, the why of his arrival isn’t the most important part.
I leave that alone. “Alex says you’re one of the biggest bands in the world. You’re living the dream.”
“Fame wasn’t the dream. Music was the dream. Connecting with people, making them feel and think and be comforted or happy. Not the rest of it. I never talk to people anymore. I talk to fans or crowds, and they talk to Min, not Jihoon.” He stares out the window. “The fame is what you put up with for the good parts. I knew there would be sacrifices, but not like this.”
I shy away and return to the matter at hand. “Sounds like you’re not sure of what to do.”
He bites the inside of his lip. “It’s hard. When Kit hyeong and Daehyun came, I felt so selfish. The decision isn’t only mine. It affects all of StarLune. I was a poor team member.”
“Then you haven’t come to a decision even after being here almost a month.”
“I thought I had, and now I’m not sure.”
“Not sure,” I repeat. “Why?”
“If I don’t go back, I’ll let everyone down.”
“If you’re not ready, you’re not ready.”
He laughs, but it’s a harsh sound that I’m not used to hearing from him. “I’ve been training for years. I will make myself ready and get over it because I owe it to the members and fans. My feelings are small when compared to everyone else.”
“That’s not how it has to be.” This is much different from the take care of yourself first mentality I’m used to.
He gives a resigned shrug. “For me, it is. I suppose I knew how this would end, Ari. I knew I would go back, but I liked to pretend to myself that I could change things.”
Where does that leave me? I’m not ready to ask it, not yet.
“What’s next, then?” The coin slips out of my fingers and drops to the ground. We both leave it.
He looks sad. “I don’t know. I want to be with you, to continue what we were starting.”
“Right.” I stand and clap my hands briskly. I had meant the general state of affairs, and I don’t want to have this specific relationship talk, not while I’m working through this new information. “Get Hana in here.”
“Ari, I—”
“Hana, I said.”
His lips thin, but he leaves without another word. Most of my fury goes with him, and I huddle into the chair. I understand about not being able to find his way to telling me the truth, but there are too many layers of betrayal for me to consider forgiving him at the moment. He lied about who he was even as I thought we had a connection. I don’t know if he was using me or for what. He’s clearly an incredible liar—how can I trust a thing he says or ever said?
I don’t know if I can. That hurts more than I anticipated.
Twenty-One
If Jihoon’s treachery is hurtful but now slightly understandable, Hana’s is unfathomable.
She sidles in, eyes downcast. “Hey.” It’s the same tone you’d use to placate a bear as you step between her and her cub. Her mobile face is pale and guilty—as it should be, because that was a hell of a truth she hid from me.
I say nothing and she crumbles. “I’m sorry,” she moans, covering her face. “I should have told you.”
“That you were cousins with a man I’m told is one of the most famous singers in the world? Why would I need to know that, even though we tell each other everything?”
“I know, it looks really bad.”
“Looks bad? It is bad, but it’s not like you planted him in my house to live in hiding and let me wallow in my ignorance like a fool. Wait, you did. That’s exactly what you did.”
“I didn’t know you’d fall for him,” she says weakly. “Jihoon’s not your type.”
“What does that mean? Super attractive, generous, sweet men can keep walking?”
“No, but you’ve always dated corporate white guys.”
“You know where I work! There’s not a lot of choice. It’s proximity, not preference.” I shake my head. “What would you have done if I recognized him?”
She snorts. “Please. I knew that wouldn’t be a problem.”
“This is not relevant right now.” I get back on track. “What is relevant is the fact you that didn’t tell me who he really was.”
“Would it matter?”
“That he has a fandom of millions and the international media was searching for him? Yeah, that would have been a good thing to know.” Would I have treated him any different if I knew he was rich and famous and wanted? I don’t want to think about this and retreat into my justifiable rage.
“See?”
I shake my head. “You’re missing the point here. It’s not who he is. It’s that you lied to me.” I want to tell her how hurt I am that she didn’t trust me, but I can’t come out and say that. The words are too hard, even with Hana. There’s been too much tonight for me to expose any vulnerability.
“I couldn’t tell you. I’m sorry.” She drops back on the bed like an anguished starfish. “It’s a huge secret in my family.”
“I don’t get why you being cousins is such a big deal. He lives in Korea.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “They had a sasaeng. Do you know what they are?”
I shake my head.
Hana bends over to hug her legs close. “They’re fans, but obsessed ones. Stalkers.”
“Jihoon had one?”
She nods and tucks her hair behind her ears. “She started by following him around airports. She eventually broke into their dorm and handcuffed herself to his bed.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Nope. It was terrifying. StarLune had recently debuted, so they weren’t even that big yet. Jihoon’s company suggested we keep our relationship secret so fans wouldn’t bother us.”
“I can’t believe your mom went along with it.”
“Obviously she would have loved the attention of being Min’s aunt. She changed her mind when Jihoon told her what some people had done to an idol’s family in New Jersey. They wouldn’t leave them alone and followed the kids to school and the parents to work, taking photos. Then one day they broke in to take souvenirs from the guy’s childhood bedroom.”
