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Just one word from you, and I’m all out of reasons
Waking up, making up for the lost time
Just one word from you, and I’m all out of reasons
Close the door, I’ve been yours for the longest time
A day before the girls celebrate Haewon’s birthday, Lily sneaks out to the CU around the corner and smuggles in a bag of goodies, determined to be the first to wish her the best year ever. Her last year of childhood before officially becoming a grown-up.
Lily gets drunk. Haewon gets tipsy even though Lily told her to just take a sip. She’s still a kid, after all. Then Lily whines about being a bad influence, and Haewon looks at her the way Haewon always looks at her. And Lily feels the clench in her chest that’s becoming ever more common these days.
Lily shouldn’t have gotten drunk. Her mouth is faster than her brain on a good day. On a drunk night when Haewon is looking at her like she hung the moon, Lily presses her lips together to prevent herself from saying something silly like, “I think I might love you more than music,” or “I want to build a life with you.” They’re building a life together already. Lily can feel it in her chest, just how close they are to debut.
“How’s the cake?” she asks instead. “It was a one-plus-one deal at the CU, so there’s another one in the fridge if Jinsol hasn’t gotten to it yet.”
Haewon nods, tongue darting out at the corner of her mouth to lick away some stray cream. “It’s good. Thank you.”
And then the clock strikes twelve, and Lily throws her arms around her and tackles her to the bed and whispers, “Happy birthday,” in her ear.
Haewon tenses for just a second, shoulders curling in.
“I wished to debut, by the way,” Haewon whispers to her after they’ve turned out the lights.
Lily whacks her softly. “You’re not supposed to tell anyone your wish. It doesn’t come true if you do.”
Haewon hums, then sticks her tongue out at Lily, unworried. But that’s Haewon.
A week later, JYP himself shows up to their practice and sends them back to the trainee dorms with thick packets of legal papers, emblazoned with “EXCLUSIVE ARTIST MANAGEMENT AGREEMENT: JYPn” across the top.
Lily worries about Haewon. She worries about all the girls. That’s easy. She’s been there the longest. She’s the oldest. And she’s nosy! She likes knowing their business even when knowing makes her worry. Because she cares.
But Lily worries about Haewon the most. Haewon avoids mirrors, she tugs at her practice clothes when they cling too close. They all have issues with their bodies. Lily tries not to think about her own, but it’s Haewon’s that scare her, the way it infects the rest of her life. Lily pretends not to see the way Haewon grips the extra skin at her hips like she’s mad at the fat underneath. Pretends not to see the divots in Haewon’s skin where she’s dug her nails in like she can just dig out chunks of herself, the Band-Aids when she presses too hard.
Lily wonders, sometimes, if Haewon should even debut. She knows it’s mean to wonder. It’s not her dream to doubt. But then she sees the way Haewon’s face twists, then smooths like nothing is wrong at all, and she wonders anyway.
Three months out from their debut date, Lily walks in on Haewon packing her things from their trainee dorm.
Haewon’s head snaps up and she looks startled before she schools her face back to a carefully blank one.
It’s like a bowling ball in Lily’s gut. She knows what’s happened before she has time to process the nausea. The only thing she can think to say is, “You told me your wish. On your birthday.”
Haewon blinks, then her face scrunches. “No, no. It’s—“ Haewon stands, pushing her baggy hoodie sleeves up her skinny arms. “I asked to leave.”
“What-at?” Lily chokes out. Her mouth is suddenly so, so dry. “Why?”
Haewon’s eyes dart to the side. “Personal…reasons,” she says carefully.
And the hurt hits Lily all at once. “That’s bullshit.” The words come out sharper than she means them. “What personal reasons? What’s so personal you can’t tell me after three years? After everything we—” She stops. Takes a breath. “You know what? Fine. Don’t tell me.”
“Unnie—”
“No, seriously. It’s fine. We’re not actually friends or anything, right? Just trainees who happened to share a room.”
She turns and leaves the room before she can say anything worse and finds herself on the metro, crammed in between two businessmen on their way home from work.
Lily rides the metro for an hour, probably. Maybe more. She winds up in a residential neighborhood, walking by a 7-Eleven where two older men laugh rowdily over their beers on the seating deck outside. She watches a few elementary schoolers kick a ball around a field. And she cries.
When Lily comes back, the lower bed in her dorm is empty. She wishes she had said something kinder to Haewon before she left.
It turns out Lily is a good leader. She’s clever and quick-witted on variety shows and reliable with the members and she even makes it a few weeks on Masked Singer. And the ache of Haewon lessens each year. In fact, she really barely even thinks about her these days. Especially not during busy weeks.
Then, suddenly, Haewon is back.
Lily is running on performance adrenaline and exhaustion in equal measure, wiping her face of sweat with a towel someone handed her as she walks off the stage, letting her body sag against the wall as soon as she’s out of sight of the audience. She can feel her pulse in her fingertips. The rush of a concert never lessens, even as a veteran idol.
She pushes off the wall and turns the corner to greet the staff, bowing to them and thanking each of them when she sees a guy with tousled brown hair in the corner. Lily doesn’t recognize him, but he’s talking animatedly to one of their dancers. She furrows her brows and squints, trying to figure out if he’s staff. But he seems too young, and he’s wearing a dark blue Yonsei letterman.
Then he turns around and all the air leaves Lily’s lungs.
“Haewon,” she mouths.
Their eyes meet across the crowded space and he looks…surprised.
There’s something in Lily that lights up with anger. What right does Haewon have? Showing up at her concert and being surprised that she’s there?
Lily’s feet carry her forward without permission.
“Hi, Lily-ssi,” Haewon greets her. His voice is different. Lower, rougher.
He fills out his letterman in a way that betrays the muscle underneath. He’s bigger than her. He’s still shorter, but he’s broader now. This is Haewon. This is not her Haewon.
Lily has so many questions. Why did you leave? She knows now—of course she knows now, looking at him. Why didn’t you tell me? Again, she gets it. She gets it so much. But the more she looks at him, the more she—
“Why did you come back? Why are you here?” Lily demands. A few people nearby glance over.
“Personal reasons,” Haewon says with a small grin.
“Don’t.” She shoves at Haewon’s stupid, broad chest, hard enough that it’s not playful. People are definitely looking now, but she’s mad. She’s been waiting years. Years! For this reunion and he’s playing around.
Haewon’s smile fades. “I’m sorry. Bad joke.” He glances around at the gathering attention and lowers his voice. “Can we—can we not do this here?”
“Then where?”
“Anywhere. Just—let me explain. Please.”
“Get drinks with me,” Lily says before she can think seriously about it. “Now. Tonight.”
Haewon blinks. “Okay.”
Lily texts Jinsol to wrangle the girls back to the dorm. She needs a breather. And Jinsol is nice like that. Taking the burden when Lily needs a break.
They meet at a little pocha a few blocks away from the venue. Haewon insists on mixing somaek “Yonsei style,” which apparently means way too much soju and not enough beer. Lily drinks it anyway.
She can’t stop staring. Trying to map the familiar onto the unfamiliar. His eyes are the same. His smile is the same. But he has an Adam’s apple now, and the faint shadow of stubble on his chin, and the way he holds himself is different. He doesn’t curl his shoulders in anymore. She tries not to let her eyes drop to his chest.
“Do you like women?” The question comes out too loud. She’s drunker than she thought.
Haewon’s lips twist into something like a puzzled grin. “I like both.”
Oh. “Oh. Me too.”
Haewon studies her for a long moment, blinking slowly. He’s drunk too. “You liked me. When we were trainees.”
It’s not a question. Lily doesn’t dignify it with a response. Instead, she takes a long drink.
“I’m not a stranger, you know,” Haewon says eventually. “You can stop looking at me like I’m a big mystery. You already know me.”
But that’s not quite fair, is it? Lily doesn’t know Haewon. Not anymore. Sure, his eyes are the same. And so is his smile. Actually, all of his facial expressions are the same. But he’s a stranger. At least Haewon knew what Lily had been up to all these years. It had been blasted across the third page of the entertainment page on Naver. And trending on Twitter, sometimes, too. It was no mystery. Haewon could follow it if he wanted.
Lily hadn’t been so lucky. All Lily knows about Haewon was that apparently, he goes to Yonsei now. And that he’s a man. And that he still looks at Lily like she’d hung the moon. She catches him when he thinks she’s not looking.
“I thought about you a lot, you know.” Haewon says when the conversation lulls. He drops formality, relaxing his weight into the table.
Lily swallows. “Then why choose now to show up?”
Haewon finishes off his third beer. “I wanted to…I guess I wanted to show you that it was for a reason. I didn’t just leave for nothing.” He fiddles with a coaster. His words are a little slow. He’s tipsy too. “It took time to get to where I am now.”
Lily’s phone buzzes. Unnie, remember we have the shoot tomorrow morning.
As if it’s been waiting, the private JYP driver turns the corner. Lily wobbles as she stands. Haewon’s hands flex around his glass like he wants to help her.
Lily is drunk. It’s the only way she’d even consider this. She’s so drunk, and this is so stupid, and it’s almost certainly going to get her in trouble with the company. But she pulls Haewon into the car behind her, and he follows, too drunk to resist.
“This is Haewon from the Girl’s Trainee Team,” Lily tells the driver. It’s dark enough that she gets away with it, and it’s not really a lie. Haewon was the leader for nearly three years. Lily thinks he’s earned this.
They arrive at the dorm. Haewon gets out behind Lily, and the driver peels away. And the wrongness of the situation hits Haewon. What was he even doing here?
“Lily, I shouldn’t—” He looks at the building. “I’m a—this could be a huge scandal if—”
Lily pulls him into the elevator, and the decision is made for him.
Haewon sways unsteadily at the edge of Lily’s bed. He shouldn’t be here. The thought is getting clearer the more sober he becomes. He’s shed his jacket already and he’s standing in the middle of her room in a t-shirt and jeans.
“Lily.” He says carefully. “I can’t just cuddle with you.”
“Why not?” She asks. She’s being dense. He knows her well enough to know that. Some things never change. She’s already in bed, wearing her penguin pajamas, patting the mattress beside her.
He gestures to himself like it’s self-evident. “I’m a man now.”
She blinks. “You’re Haewon.”
“Lily.” If she really wants to play this game, he’ll play. He peels off his shirt, watching her face. It’s not like she’d let his street clothes into her bed anyway.
Something close to alarm flickers across her face, then something like…something like interest. Then she blinks it away. Like she’s determined to see nothing different at all. Determined to pretend he’s still the same person.
He sheds his pants, hyperaware of her eyes tracking the movement, flicking down to his plain blue boxers just for a second before she scoots back again, determinedly inviting him again.
Fine. He’ll pretend too.
He gets into bed beside her and they lie there in the dark, facing each other. The silence stretches. His heart is pounding hard enough that he wonders if she can hear it.
He takes the time to study her face in the light of her bedside reading lamp. She’s lost the baby fat in her cheeks and her jaw is more striking now. But her eyes are the same. Her mouth is the same. The way she’s looking at him…that’s the same too.
It’s comforting, still knowing her. Still being able to read her expressions even after three years.
He wonders what she sees in his face. If there’s anything left of the person she knew. He doesn’t feel like he’s changed that much, but he must have. His voice is different. His body is different.
Haewon’s eyes dip to her lips. As always, her lips are pretty, too.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like that, Haewon.”
“Like—”
“Either kiss me or stop it.”
That shuts him up. He kisses her hard into her pillow.
Kissing Lily is softer than he’d imagined. And he had imagined it—not often, back when they were trainees, but it would occur to him. In those thoughts she’d been different: more aggressive, more certain. She’d kiss back harder, push into him, grab his shoulders and lead. Be his unnie.
But she yields instead, letting him guide her down into the pillows, gasping softly as he presses his tongue past her lips. It rewires something in his brain, the way she softens under him.
He pulls back for a breath and her eyes flutter open, dazed and pretty, and he can’t handle the way she’s looking at him. Can’t handle how much he wants this. So he deflects, pinches the fabric of her sleep pants between his fingers. “Cute,” he says, lips quirking.
She looks down at the penguins. “Shut up,” she says before pulling him into another kiss.
Haewon is already most of the way undressed. Lily’s hands skim over his back, tentative, faltering when they hit the waistband of his boxers.
He mouths at the skin where her jaw and ear meet, feels her shudder, and lets his hands slip under her sleep shirt. His fingers splay across her ribs and he can feel her heartbeat, fast and fluttering.
“Can I?” He asks, and she makes a small, strangled sound.
“Oh, um, yeah,” she breathes.
He pulls the shirt over her head and then his chest is pressed to hers and the slide of skin is electric. Her breath hitches.
He swings a leg over her hips to straddle her, lets his hands drift up her ribs, grazing the underside of her breasts before cupping them properly. She squirms beneath him and the movement sends a jolt through his entire body.
He nips at her earlobe, feeling her panting against him. Then he pulls back to look at her—flushed and breathing hard and so, so pretty—and before she can be self-conscious about it, he leans down and takes her nipple in his mouth.
She slaps a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound she makes and he feels it everywhere. He’s so hard. He’s still a little drunk. He’s sure she must be able to feel the way he’s leaking through his boxers. The alcohol is making everything heightened, electric. Or maybe it’s just her.
Lily laughs suddenly, a small breathless sound, and he pulls back to quirk an eyebrow at her.
“Nothing,” she gasps. “Sorry. Keep going.”
He takes her other nipple into his mouth, lets his thumb skate over the spit-slick skin of the first, and her hips jump beneath him. His buck back automatically and the friction makes him groan against her skin.
Her hands slide up his thighs, tentative, then bolder, slipping up the legs of his boxers to cup his ass.
He nods against her chest.
Haewon wakes to an alarm, harsh and insistent. He cracks his eyes open. Not even light out yet. Who sets an alarm this early—
Then the body under him jerks awake and he remembers. Lily must remember at the same time because she freezes. Their eyes meet and the first thing out of her mouth is, “oh no.”
For a second, they just stare at each other. Then her second alarm goes off and her face goes pale.
“Oh no,” she says.
“Oh no,” she says again, shoulders drawing up toward her ears. “Oh no, oh no.”
Haewon appreciates her commitment to not swearing, but if there ever were a time…He tries to meet her eyes as he locates his boxers in the piles of sheets and pulls on his pants, but she’s too busy pulling herself together, pinging between brushing her hair and getting dressed and texting what he assumes is the manager.
“We need to get you out of here,” she says, not looking at him. She’s pulling on a bra under her sleep shirt with a misplaced sense of modesty. Like he hadn’t had his mouth all over her chest the night before. “Seriously. No one can see you.”
“I know.” His voice comes out rough from sleep. He finds his boxers and stumbles into them, along with his pants.
She’s wound so tight he thinks she might snap and when she finally looks at him, pulling her hair into a ponytail. She looks guilty. “We can’t do this again.”
“I know,” Haewon says.
She opens the door a crack, checks both ways, then waves him forward. “Stairs. Not the elevator. And uh, if you see anyone, just—I don’t know. Run?”
The absurdity of it almost makes him laugh, but her face is too serious. So he nods and follows her out, moving as quietly as he can through the sleeping dorm. They make it to the stairwell without incident.
“Sorry,” she says. She scrunches her face up.
“Don’t be.” He wants to kiss her, but he doesn’t.
Her expression does something complicated. Then she pushes open the door and he slips out.
Haewon takes a breath once he’s on the bus back to campus. One stupid night and he’ll never see her again. They had tension from years ago and they acted on it and they can both move on. He unlocks his phone and only hesitates for a moment before he opens social media and types in Lily’s name.
She looks so different on stage. Nothing like the woman beneath him in bed last night. Which he knew. He’d known that since he’d been a trainee with her, the way she transformed once a microphone was in her hand. It’s more shocking now, maybe. Now that he’s seen her shudder under his touch. The trainee Lily he remembered was so much closer to the woman on stage. Maybe he hadn’t known her at all.
The video ends, and he stares at it until the screen dims and then goes dark.
The next week, Lily texts him. Are you free for dinner?
He stares at his phone for a full minute before responding. What had happened to not doing it again? Yeah, he replies.
They meet at a cheap kimbap place near his place.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.”
Lily talks between bites, filling the silence with little stories. About how Sullyoon keeps stealing her face masks. About the stew Kyujin made last week. About the cat she’d seen on her way here.
But nothing about NMIXX. Haewon feels, for a moment, like he’s living another life, or maybe Lily is. One where she’s a classmate of his, an international student from Australia, and he’s just a local guy.
“Do you want to come back to my place?” he asks, because someone has to say it.
“Yeah,” she says, like she’s been waiting for him to ask. “Yeah, I do.”
His apartment is tiny, even compared to the cramped single room in the NMIXX dorm that Lily must have pulled her eldest card to get. He’d gotten the cheapest, smallest futon sofa that he could find and crammed it in between the one block of counter and the shower. He winces at the pair of used underwear peeking out from under the sofa. It looked way better in the daytime. In the stark, cool lighting from the single recessed overhead, it looked barely better than a closet.
“I’ve never been in a goshiwon before,” Lily says, poking her head into the bathroom area before immediately straightening up. “Sorry, I’m being nosy.”
“It’s alright. You can look.” Haewon toes off his shoes and hooks his jacket on the back of his door.
“So,” she says.
“So.” He replies. “We said we weren’t going to do this again.”
“I know.”
It’s only a few steps to his bed.
It becomes a pattern over the following weeks.
Lily texts him between schedules. Free Thursday night? or Can I come over? or sometimes just Miss you.
Lily keeps him company during finals week. She has the time off between promotion cycles and it’s gotten cold enough in the city that cuddling feels like a necessity. He tries to focus on his textbook, but his eyes keep drifting over to her. Time would be much better spent with her.
“You’re staring,” she says without looking up.
“No I’m not.”
“I’m distracting you.”
Haewon doesn’t think there’s a world in which Lily isn’t distracting. Even just like this, spread out on his bed, scrolling through social media.
He thinks about it, again. Lily the exchange student. Maybe they met at a general lecture. She’d almost certainly be a literature major of some sort. He tears his eyes away and refocuses on his notes.
One night, Lily falls asleep mid-fuck, exhausted from back-to-back schedules. He slips his hand out from her underwear gently and tucks her in, making sure the blanket covers her properly, then orders delivery for himself.
He eats japchae at his counter in the dark, watching her sleep. She looks younger like this, face relaxed. It reminds him of trainee days.
Lily visits Haewon at work one afternoon when she has a rare few hours between schedules. She watches from a distance first, mask and hat pulled low.
He’s good at his job, not that she really had any doubt. Haewon had always been driven to excel. He folds clothes with practiced efficiency, restocking shelves, and helping an older woman find her size with a polite smile.
Haewon sells a Matin Kim windbreaker to a man in his forties as Lily leafs passively through a rack of dress shirts. Lily had done a shoot for the brand the week before. Her contract was probably worth more than Haewon made in three months. She tries to squash the thought from her brain.
“Can I help you?” Lily jumps out of her skin when Haewon materializes next to her. “Are you looking for a gift, or—” Haewon pauses. “Lily?”
“Um. Hi,” she says sheepishly. “I wanted to see you and I was in the area for a schedule and…sorry. It was impulsive.”
She glances over at him, expecting…she doesn’t actually know. His blank Haewon-expression, probably, or maybe poorly-hidden annoyance. Instead, he’s grinning at her. “I have break time in five, and there’s a stairwell around that corner that no one uses.”
Lily waits for him there and it occurs to her that this is the least she’s felt like an idol in the past few years. It’s so unclassy of her to do this. It’s so stupid. If she got caught, it would be big trouble for the group. But she’s just Lily here, who has some kind of unlabeled relationship with a sales associate.
She wonders, again, helpless to the pull of what if, what Haewon would be like if he’d stayed. He could model for the Matin Kim men’s line instead of folding and stacking their shirts. He’s so handsome. He’d be good at it. It’s a stupid thought, but he deserves more than—
He pushes through the door and kisses her, urgent and hungry. “Missed you.”
“Missed you too.”
When they break apart, he tilts his head. “What?”
“You should be modeling for them, not folding their clothes,” she blurts out.
His expression shutters. “Lily—”
“Sorry. That came out wrong. I just meant—you’d be good at it. You have the face for it.” She stops herself at the clench of his jaw.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he says quietly.
“Like what?”
“Like you feel sorry for me. I chose this.”
“I know. I know it’s stupid. I just—” Lily cuts herself off. What does she want? “I want to kiss you.”
Haewon blinks and the pinched expression is gone. She’s glad he doesn’t want to linger on it either. It was stupid. It was a stupid thing to say. “I can do kissing,” he says against her lips.
His break is only fifteen minutes. They spend the last ten making out in the stairwell like teenagers. When he goes back, she buys a scarf she doesn’t need just to have an excuse to see him one more time before she leaves.
They find a tiny noraebang on a side street around the corner from Haewon’s place, tucked below a shuttered porridge restaurant. The guy at the counter barely looks up from his phone game when he points them toward their room.
Lily scrolls through the song list while Haewon gets beers from the front. She’s already had two at dinner. Haewon can tell by the way she’s sitting—loose-limbed, leaning into the screen.
She turns to him, excited. “They already have our new song!” she comments. Her eyes shine, and his heart skips a beat. “Do you want a private performance?” She waggles her eyebrows.
Like Haewon would ever turn down a chance to hear Lily sing.
Haewon’s not sure anyone has looked more at home with a mic in her hand than Lily. It might be a cliche, but if anyone was born to sing, it was her. She’s ethereal, even in the cheesy, flashing lights of the noraebang. She closes her eyes to hit the high note and he can feel something in his throat. He still gets chills. Just like when they were trainees. How could he not have fallen for her?
She finishes and grins at him, flushed and breathless. “Your turn.”
“I’m good.”
“Come on.” Lily’s already scrolling again. “Oh! This one.” She presses a button and the opening notes start. Survivor. Haewon remembers the late nights practicing, locked in a vocal room no bigger than this room, hunched over their music and ramyeon, giggling and singing and so, so close to debut.
Lily offers him a mic and he shakes his head, throat tight. He can’t—he can’t. He takes a long sip of his beer instead.
She shrugs and starts, singing the first part of the verse. His old part. He mouths along, muscle memory, even years later. She grins at him, raising her eyebrows, and belts the chorus.
She’s good. Better than she was as a trainee. She’d learned how to control her power. And it’s more mature now, there’s a texture there that’s unfamiliar, deeper, beautiful.
“Come on,” Lily says, still singing, waving the mic at him.
“I’m good here.”
“Haewon.” She lowers the mic, letting the backing track play.
“You sound so good solo,” he hedges, hooking a finger into her belt loop, tugging her in. “I can’t upstage a professional!”
She gives up and finishes the verse herself.
Then the bridge hits and she turns back towards him, her eyebrows raised expectantly. Lily holds the mic out one more time. A challenge. Haewon swallows. There’s only so many times he can refuse her.
He takes the mic, wetting his lips before the final chorus. The melody line sits well above where his voice wants to go now. He feels the strain as he tries to hit the notes.
She doesn’t say anything. Just keeps singing. But he can see her surprise. It’s humiliating.
He doesn’t have the range or the power. He tries to sit back down, let Lily finish strong, but she loops her arm around his shoulders as his voice cracks on a note that used to be so easy to hit. His face flames. He used to be so good.
Lily wakes up at 7:30 to five missed calls from “SQU4D Marketing” and a message. Call when you wake up.
There’s half a dozen photos from Dispatch, and it’s too late to take them down. They’re well on their way to viral. Lily’s stomach drops.
It’s her and Haewon that first night. At the pocha. He has his hand on her face and she’s leaning into him. She doesn’t remember it feeling so intimate.
Her phone won’t stop buzzing.
By the time she gets to practice, the members have all heard…something. And their conversation trails off as she enters the practice room.
“Unnie,” Jinsol says carefully. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. It’s not what it looks like,” Lily lies.
“What does it look like?” Kyujin asks.
“Um,” Lily licks her lips, scrambling. “It’s just a childhood friend who was in town.” She glances past Kyujin to Jiwoo, who’s queuing up their music for practice, even as she steals glances back at the four of them.
Marketing and Legal have a statement out by the end of the day. Lily scans it before they send it out, rehearsing the story just in case someone asks.
He's just a childhood friend from Australia who was visiting Seoul. The angle and lighting makes us look closer than we were.
It’s put to rest within a day.
It’s less stressful than she’d expected. Jinsol suggests she might have more leeway as a foreigner. She jokes that it’s good for them to have one harmless dating rumor under their belts.
Jiwoo corners Lily after practice. “Unnie, what’s going on? Really.”
“I’m kind of seeing someone,” Lily admits. “It’s…complicated.”
Jiwoo nods slowly. “I think everyone in the group knows. You’re not at the dorm as much as usual.” Jiwoo pauses as a group of trainees peek their heads in, looking for a spare practice room. They bow, flustered, and scurry out. Jiwoo continues. “Can I meet him?”
It’s a terrible idea. Lily agrees anyway.
They meet at a quiet Yeonnam cafe, early enough that it’s nearly empty.
Haewon gets there early, fifteen minutes before the time Lily had texted him to get there. Just in case. He orders his Americano and plants himself in the back corner of the upstairs seating area, picking at his salt bread.
He’s nervous in a way he hasn’t been in years. Not since before his transition. He honestly thought he was past this. Thought he’d figured out how to exist in his own skin.
But this is different. It’s not really about him at all. It’s about Lily. He isn’t even really sure why she’d agreed to this in the first place.
Jiwoo hasn’t seen him in years, doesn’t know him anymore. And even if she did, this is certainly not the situation she would have expected to meet him in. It’s just all so, so messy.
When Lily and Jiwoo arrive, he stands automatically. Bows. Too formal. He’s being too formal.
“Hi,” he says stiffly. “Thanks for coming.”
Jiwoo looks surprised by the awkwardness but covers it with a smile. “Of course. Any friend of Lily-unnie’s.”
Even here, in an empty Yeonnam salt bread shop they’re careful. Of course they are.
Lily is vibrating with anxiety beside him. Under the table, he taps her knee once with his. He tries to make small talk, asks Jiwoo about their comeback prep, uses his customer service voice from work.
Jiwoo is sweet about it, trying to put them both at ease. She tells a story about their maknae line getting into trouble at a recent variety show recording, and it’s funny enough that Haewon laughs.
And Jiwoo goes completely still.
Her eyes lock onto his face with sudden intensity, and he watches her put it together. Sees the exact moment recognition hits.
“Haewon-unnie?” Jiwoo asks, quietly.
Haewon stiffens. There’s an instinctual twist in his gut at the honorific. Coming from Jiwoo, who’d known him at his worst, no less.
“Sorry!” Jiwoo is quick to amend. “Haewon…oppa?”
His throat is dry. He nods slowly.
Jiwoo looks between him and Lily, her face moving like she doesn’t know how to react before her expression finally settles on something like pity.
“Oh,” Jiwoo says softly to Lily. “Oh, unnie.” Like Haewon is a problem she’ll have to navigate. Which…isn’t inaccurate.
The rest of the meeting passes in awkward pleasantries until Jiwoo makes an excuse to leave. A practice or a haircut or a lunch across the city. Lily stays behind and laces her hand with Haewon’s
“That wasn’t so bad,” Lily says.
He hums. He’s not sure even she believes that.
Four months in, Lily shows up to Haewon’s apartment with her contract renewal papers.
“Are you going to sign?” he asks.
“Of course.”
“Of course,” he echoes.
She turns and looks at him, and sometimes it really feels like she can stare into his soul. He wants to look away, shut whatever window she has into his thoughts. It’s too late
“I love this,” she says. “You know that, right? I love performing, and I love the members.”
“I know.” He turns away to grab a cup for water.
Lily is silent for a long moment. “Sometimes I think about what it would be like,” she starts quietly, “If things were different. If I could just—”
“Lily, don’t—”
“If you hadn’t left.” It comes out sharper than she probably means it. That just means it’s been on her mind. “Or if you’d stayed. Or if I’d—I don’t know. Done something different.”
“You couldn’t have done anything different,” he says, keeping his voice level. “I would never ask you to give up NMIXX.”
“You did.”
He works his jaw. “That’s not the same thing.” He’s careful with his words, pushing the anger back down. “I gave it up because I had to. Because I would have—” He stops. “It’s not the same.”
“Do you regret it? Transitioning? Giving up debut?” Lily looks surprised even as she’s saying it. Like it stumbled its way out of her subconscious. It doesn’t take the sting out of the question, though.
Haewon’s whole body goes rigid. “That’s not fair.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know—I didn’t mean—” Her face crumples. He can see the regret on her face, the wobble in her lower lip.
But it’s too late. “No.” His voice comes out hard. “I don’t regret it. I’d die if I had to go back.” He licks his lips. “Do you regret meeting me again?” He might as well know.
The silence stretches between them.
“Sometimes,” Lily admits, glancing back down at the contract. “It was easier.”
Haewon stands. Grabs his jacket from the back of the chair. His apartment feels suffocating.
“Wait—” she reaches for him.
He sidesteps her hand. “I need to go.”
“Haewon—”
Three days later, Lily shows up at the department store at closing time. She waits outside in her mask and hat. She wonders what she looks like to passersby. A girlfriend waiting for her boyfriend? Just another shopper?
Employees trickle out of Haewon’s department store. She scans the steady stream for his olive bomber. It doesn’t take long to spot him.
He sees her and stops, glancing away, like he’s looking for an excuse to head back in. She hadn’t considered that possibility—that he might refuse to even speak to her.
“I’m sorry,” she steps closer before he can move. “What I said was really cruel.”
“It was honest.” He starts walking, hands shoved in his pockets.
“It was both.” She’s almost jogging to keep up with his brisk stride. This isn’t how she imagined this going. She’d pictured them stopping, talking it out, hugging and parting and…well, in Lily’s mind there was an orchestral swell. But it hadn’t been this. “Haewon, please. Can we just—can we talk?”
“What’s there to talk about?” He doesn’t look at her. “You’re right. This is impossible. We both knew that.”
She had known. Of course she’d known. She’d been ignoring that since she’d snuck him out. But hearing him say it makes it real in a way it hadn’t been before. “I know, but—”
“So why are you here?” He finally stops, turns to face her. They’re under a streetlight now. She can see his face clearly—the set of his jaw, the tiredness around his eyes. She wonders if he’s slept at all in the past three days. She hasn’t, not really, not even on her precious days off.
“Because I don’t want to end it like this.” She’s talking too fast but she can’t help it. “Because I—” She stops. Swallows. Three days ago she’d told him she wished he’d stayed gone. The contradiction isn’t lost on her. “Because I love you. And I know that makes it worse, but it’s true.”
He stares at her for a long moment. “Lily—”
“You don’t have to say it back.” She’s quick to add. “I just needed you to know. Before we—”
A car passes. Someone laughs from a nearby restaurant. The world keeps moving around them.
“Come on.” He glances around. “Let’s go before someone recognizes you.”
“I, um, have a car waiting.” She gestures vaguely down the street where a black company sedan idles.
He follows her gaze. “Lily. The company car?”
“The drivers are on contract! And it was this or the metro and the dispatch front page again, right?”
The ride back is silent. Haewon bounces his leg, anxious. Was it better to get it over with? Rip the band-aid off? Maybe he should have called it quits in the parking lot. He’d assumed he’d never see her again after he’d gone out to cool off. Had that not been final?
He should have known better. Lily didn’t give up when other people would have. It’s what made her an idol. Maybe, if he’d been more like Lily…
The driver pulls to a stop and unlocks the door. Lily pulls her mask up and her hat down and they make their way inside.
He doesn’t even have time to toe off his shoes before she’s tugging him down for a kiss. “I missed you.” She murmurs against his lips. “A lot.”
He stumbles out of his shoes and hoists her up to cross the couple steps to his bed. He hadn’t folded it up that morning, and he lets out a little breath when he deposits her before pulling off his shirt and joining her on the bed.
He mouths at her neck. He wants to mark her. Show the world he was here. She gasps and squirms under him, fingers fumbling with the buttons of her own shirt.
“What if—” she starts.
“Don’t.”
But she keeps going anyway. “What if in a few years, after my contract—”
Haewon pulls back, looks her in the eyes. “Lily. Don’t do that to yourself. Or to me.”
“I know.” She glances past him at the discolored corner of his ceiling. They stay like that for a second before she twists her fingers into his hair and pulls him in for another kiss.
Lily wakes to her alarm, turning it off quickly. It’s still dark out.
She lies there for a moment, studying Haewon’s face in the dim light from the street. The line of his jaw. The way his hair falls across his forehead. Trying to memorize it.
She slips out of bed and gets dressed as quietly as possible. Finds her phone. Her shoes.
Her phone is already blowing up. The manager asking for her ETA, the members pinging back and forth with memes, her schedule for the day.
In the car to the salon, Lily watches the sun rise over Seoul. Early morning vendors set up their carts and office workers hurry to the subway. Haewon is still asleep, probably. He’ll wake up at three and go to class and get dinner from his favorite noodle stand.
Lily’s phone chimes again. Sullyoon is asking if anyone wants breakfast.
Lily replies, Yes! Get me something. I’m starving! and watches the gifs roll in from the other girls.