“Chaeyoung, Chaeyoung!”
The voices grow in intensity and aggression as she approaches her car. Her bodyguards hold back the pulsing crowd of reporters and fans and Chaeyoung does her best to keep her head down and her expression smooth. Her dress, so far from her usual hoodies and baggy jeans, makes her feel exposed and she fights the urge to cross her arms across her chest.
“Chaeyoung! Please comment on how you feel about the loss! Chaeyoung!”
She ducks her head to enter the car, feeling her bodyguard’s hand follow the crown of her head to make sure she doesn’t slam it into the door frame, as if she’s never entered a car on her own before. She manages to get in without his help, and the cool of the leather immediately soothes her overheated skin. There’s a split second of quiet after the door shuts behind her, before her window is being rolled down by her manager from the front seat.
“Chaeyoung! I love you! I love you so much! Chaeyoung!”
Mina tells her to wave, and she does because she knows what happens if she doesn’t – weeks and weeks of articles written by trashy websites calling her rude and heartless. Saying she doesn’t care about her fans. Not that most of these people are actually her fans. Still, she lifts her hand and wiggles her fingers, and the cheers get louder. She peeks her head out of the window to give them just a little bit more and then decides that’s enough and rolls her window up and leans back into her seat.
“Good show today,” Mina says as she carefully maneuvers the car through the throng of people outside the award show venue. “Too bad you didn’t win. Would have been good press.”
Chaeyoung does her best not roll her eyes. Mina isn’t a bad person. She’s just good at her job, which is making sure Chaeyoung earns as much money as possible. Even if that means wanting her to win a meaningless award that is based almost entirely on her popularity rather than the quality of the music she produces. Mina doesn’t care about that. Mina is always thinking of the next headline, the next Instagram post, the next photoshoot.
“The after-party starts in an hour,” Mina says. “I booked a hotel room nextdoor to the club so that you can change and eat. The make-up and hair crew will meet us there. What should I order?”
“McDonalds,” Chaeyoung answers, as she stares out the window.
“You should eat something healthier and-“
“McDonalds,” Chaeyoung repeats, and Mina lets it go.
“Soyeon is also meeting us at the hotel,” Mina says. “Are you sure you want her to be your plus one? Her image these days is quite controversial and-“
“I thought these after-parties were closed to the media,” Chaeyoung says.
“Well, they are, but it’s better to be carefu-“
“Soyeon is my friend,” Chaeyoung says. “And she’s the only person that will make this night tolerable for me. If she doesn’t go, I also don’t go.”
Mina sighs but, again, doesn’t bother arguing. Mina was only assigned as her manager about a month ago and they’re still trying to find their footing around each other. But she is slowly starting to learn that there are some things she can’t make Chaeyoung budge on. If she wants Chaeyoung’s cooperation in the long run, she just needs to let go.
“Just try not to make any enemies tonight,” she says eventually.
Chaeyoung isn’t sure why Mina thinks that she might.
Chaeyoung looks around the party in distaste.
“How long do we have to stay here again?” she asks Soyeon.
“At least an hour. You need to show your face. The underground rapper vibe has been working for you with the general public, but you need to network if you want to stay relevant. Talk to some people.”
Chaeyoung doesn’t bother mentioning that she doesn’t want to network with these people – phonies of the pop industry. Pretty faces who sell away their artistic vision (if they even had it in the first place) to whatever fads and trends their fans want them to follow. Dreaming only of fame and riches and being adored at any cost. Soyeon has heard Chaeyoung’s rant about it before and she agrees to a point, but she’s cunning and will shake hands with anyone as long as it gets her where she needs to go. Chaeyoung understands that too, respects it even, but that doesn’t mean she’s willing to stoop to that level herself. Telling Soyeon that is like talking to a wall, so she keeps her mouth shut and searches instead for something to occupy her hands with.
She finds it in a double of whiskey and makes her way to a dark corner in the hopes that no one will try to approach her. Soyeon is already shaking hands with someone Chaeyoung doesn’t recognize but who looks important if his expensive watch and perfectly tailored suit are anything to go by. She’s batting her eyelashes at him and Chaeyoung has to look away in disgust.
Her attention is pulled back to the party only a second later by some sort of ruckus. Chaeyoung doesn’t want to be curious but can’t ignore the whooping and the shouted ‘They’re here!’. She turns her head lazily to see five young women enter the party. She recognizes them immediately. She is Korean after all, she lives in Seoul. They are plastered on every billboard, in every advertisem*nt, on every channel on TV. Twice. Nayeon, Sana, Momo, Jihyo, and Tzuyu. She knows their faces, their names, their music and everything she’s learned about them has been against her will. She only sees them for a second before they’re engulfed by a flood of people who want to talk to them.
Chaeyoung scoffs into her glass. Everyone here is a celebrity in their own right. Why the hell are they simpering over these girls? These girls whose only addition to the music industry, as far as Chaeyoung can perceive from their sugar-sweet, over-produced music, is to look pretty and sell false fantasies to the simpering boys who call themselves their fans.
It's all too much for Chaeyoung to take seriously and she decides that regardless of what Soyeon says, she’s going to leave after she finishes this drink. There are better places to get drunk and better company too. She wonders if Jeongyeon would still be awake at this hour. If not, maybe she’ll go into the studio for a bit. There’s nothing that calms her nerves more than having her DAW in front of her and the weight of her headphones over her ears. She starts to imagine the sounds she’ll try to draw from the equipment, the drum beats, the synths she’ll layer over top, and the melody-
“Son Chaeyoung-ssi!”
Chaeyoung’s imaginings get woefully cut short and it takes everything in her to mask her annoyance as she looks up to find herself face to face with… Park Jihyo. She’s looking at Chaeyoung with that bright, eager look that Chaeyoung has started to associate with her more fanatic fans. But she’s also seen that expression on Park Jihyo in front of TV cameras, in music videos, and on stage earlier when she’d been accepting Twice’s award for best K-pop group. It’s fake, Chaeyoung is pretty sure. She hates fake people. She never knows what they want from her.
“Hello,” she says cautiously.
“Hi! I’m Park Jihyo,” she introduces herself unnecessarily. “It’s so nice to meet you.”
“Right,” Chaeyoung says, unsure of what the hell this girl wants from her. “Well, it’s nice to meet you too.”
“Can I have a seat?”
Jihyo gestures to the seat next to her and Chaeyoung really wants to say ‘no’. Her drink is almost finished which means she could leave soon as long as she doesn’t get caught up in a super long, painful conversation. But she can’t think of a good excuse and so with a small sigh, gives Jihyo an affirming nod.
“Your performance tonight was electric,” Jihyo says. “Honestly. I was blown away. I’m a huge, huge fan of yours.”
Chaeyoung looks down at her drink as she clenches her jaw. She’s heard that line tonight more times than she can count. It used to spark pride back when she was performing mostly in small bars and venues that only allowed for standing room. She used to be able to trust it, but now… now most of the people who call themselves her fans don’t even listen to her music. Sure, they hear the sounds, the melodies and beats, but they don’t listen. It pisses her off.
“Oh, really?” she asks, and she plasters what she hopes is a pleasant smile on her face. “What’s your favorite song?”
It’s a test. Jihyo doesn’t know that. But Chaeyoung has one answer that she doesn’t want to hear. As long as Jihyo doesn’t say-
“’Superstar’,” Jihyo answers without pause.
Chaeyoung can’t keep in her scoff.
“You and every other teenage girl that calls themselves my fan,” she says.
She knows it’s rude. She doesn’t care.
“It’s a good song,” Jihyo says, brow furrowing in confusion at Chaeyoung’s tone. “A really good song. It’s one of the best I’ve heard recently and-“
“Can you name any of my other songs?” Chaeyoung says. “You can’t just call yourself my fan just because you heard one song on TikTok. It’s not my best one by far. It’s just the only one put over a pop beat to make it more consumable by the mass public. Have you even really listened to it? If you had you would know that it’s not a song that’s meant to be liked.”
Jihyo goes silent. The brightness in her eyes dims and her lips turn from that wide smile into a thin line across her face. Chaeyoung wants to scoff again. Of course she can’t name any other songs. Of course she only knows the viral hit, the song that had gotten Chaeyoung’s name pulled out of the dark corners of the underbelly of the hip-hop world into the limelight. Jihyo is pulling a Soyeon, batting her eyes at someone in the industry to get… something. Chaeyoung doesn’t know what one of the most idols in the country could possibly want from her, but she’s not so naïve as to not recognize flattery when she hears it.
Jihyo regards Chaeyoung carefully for a second before she stands slowly. She turns to walk away and then pauses to look back at Chaeyoung.
“I can name every one of your songs. I’ve listened to every single album, and I’ve loved every single one. From Weekend Trip to Justice,” Jihyo says, her tone even but lacking all the warmth it had carried before. “I think you’re wrong though. ‘Superstar’ is your best.”
With that, she turns on heel and walks back into the crowd. She’s welcomed back raucously and Chaeyoung throws back the rest of her drink and picks up her phone. A sick, guilty feeling builds in her stomach, but she ignores it.
“Hey Jeong,” she says. “I’m leaving the party now. Want to meet up?”
“Why do you look so pissy? Was the award show really that bad?”
Chaeyoung looks at Jeongyeon through the haze of smoke she exhales.
“Yeah,” she says. “Afterparty sucked too.”
“Damn, can’t believe I used to want to be a celebrity,” Jeongyeon says. “If the award shows and the afterparties suck, then what’s left?”
Chaeyoung shrugs. She never wanted to be a celebrity anyway. Just wanted to make music. Wanted to touch people. She takes another long pull from her vape and lets the feeling of it relax her into the couch.
It does nothing to erase Jihyo’s expression from her mind.
“Where’s your head at?” Suga asks. “You’ve been looping the same track for the last fifteen minutes. Are you going to rap or not?”
Chaeyoung looks at the lyrics on the sheet in front of her. She’d liked them when she’d first written them, but she’s looking at them now and feels like there’s something wrong. Can’t put it into words exactly what it is though.
If she’s being honest with herself, nothing has felt right since the after-party. Not a damn thing. Her interaction with Park Jihyo has been haunting her. Park Jihyo herself has been haunting her. Those large, dark eyes of hers and bright, wide smile are everywhere. Even the recording studio has a picture of her in the front hall from the time Twice had recorded something or another there.
But the expression branded in Chaeyoung’s mind is one that she never sees on the billboards and magazine covers. Thin lips, blank eyes. It had taken Chaeyoung a little bit to put a name to the face Jihyo had given her as she’d said her last words, but it had come eventually. Disappointment. ‘Never meet your heroes,’ Chaeyoung wants to say but… she was never supposed to be anyone’s hero.
“Hello?” Suga says. “If you’re not going to do anything, can I go home? I have my own sh*t to work on, you know?”
Chaeyoung sighs and takes off the headphones, stepping out of the recording booth to join Suga in the control room.
“Do you know Park Jihyo?” she asks.
“Who? The idol?” Suga asks. “No, not really. I’ve produced for Stray Kids before but not for Twice. Why are you asking?”
Chaeyoung sighs.
“Met her at the afterparty last week,” she says. “She… she said she was my fan.”
Suga laughs.
“Really? You?” he says. “That’s unexpected from the leader of the nation’s girl group. Wouldn’t have thought the aegyo queens would have listened to your depressing sh*t.”
“She said ‘Superstar’ was her favorite song,” Chaeyoung says.
“Ah, so a fake fan,” he says. “That makes sense.”
Chaeyoung feels a little vindicated by his response. At least she wasn’t the only one with that kneejerk response. And he knows just as well as she does what Superstar is about. He had been the one to help produce the music for her lyrics when she had struggled to get the sound right.
“Yeah,” Chaeyoung says. “Except she knew my other music too. Even going back to Weekend Trip.”
Suga’s expression morphs into surprise.
“She knows Weekend Trip?”
His confusion is warranted because Chaeyoung’s first album, self-produced in her parents’ attic, isn’t on any streaming services. The only place it can be found is where it was originally posted on her SoundCloud. When she’d transferred her earlier works to the major platforms, that one had stayed. It was too rough around the edges. The production levels were off, the sound quality clearly reflective of where it had been recorded, and the lyrics, while true to who she was at the time, were immature. She’d considered re-recording but the words written by a teenager aren’t reflective of who she is anymore. She had ultimately decided to let it go… the people that cared, the ones that mattered would find it.
“Okay, so maybe not a fake fan,” Suga says. “Damn, that’s cool, don’t you think?”
“Well, she probably isn’t my fan anymore,” Chaeyoung says.
“What did you do? Did you give her a taste of the brooding Chaeyoung special?”
Chaeyoung rolls her eyes and wants to argue, hating the term Suga and Jeongyeon reserve to describe her more impatient moods, but she can’t. The award show had left her feeling drained and the bootlicking at the party had made her want to crawl out of her skin. It had put Chaeyoung on edge and Jihyo had been the one unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire. By mentioning ‘Superstar’ – the song that, in Chaeyoung’s mind, was emblematic of the problem with how people consumed her music – Jihyo had found an exposed nerve to poke and Chaeyoung had lashed out.
“I might have,” she admits.
“Well, then it’s a good thing you two will probably never cross paths again,” Suga says.
“Since when are you and Park Jihyo friends?” Chaeyoung hisses into Soyeon’s ear.
“Huh? Oh, since the KMA’s after-party,” Soyeon answers. “I ended up talking to her a bunch after you Irish goodbye-d. She’s super cool actually. Super easy to get along with.”
Jihyo stands out like a sore thumb among the collection of rappers, hip-hop artists, and producers that have made themselves at home in Soyeon’s spacious living room. While everyone around her is wearing the latest in streetwear, she’s dressed primly in what Chaeyoung is pretty sure is Louis Vuitton. Her skin is smooth, unblemished from tattoos or piercings. Her posture is straight and her smile near permanent.
Chaeyoung debates the merits of just leaving this party altogether. But it would be cowardly and Chaeyoung likes to think that she isn’t a coward. Plus it’s Soyeon’s birthday. She can leave unannounced from a music show after-party but if she leaves her friend’s birthday party without a good reason… well, she might be down to just Suga and Jeongyeon for people who will spend time with her without being paid by the hour.
“Are you her fan or something?” Soyeon asks.
“Huh?”
“I didn’t peg you for a girl group fan but if you like her you should talk to her instead of just staring at her,” Soyeon says.
“I wasn’t staring,” Chaeyoung hisses, turning her gaze away from Jihyo.
“Okay, whatever you say. Can you pass me the soju?”
Soyeon pours two shot glasses till they’re almost overflowing and hands her one.
“Cheers to being f*cking ancient,” she says.
“Happy birthday bitch,” Chaeyoung says, and they throw back the shots.
They drink another three before Soyeon gets pulled away by Yuqi and Chaeyoung is left to wander the party to find someone she finds interesting enough to talk to. She likes most of the people here. Soyeon’s friends mostly consist of people like them. They had to work their way up from the bottom to make a name for themselves. She sees herself in them and they see themselves in her and that makes it easy to talk. Except it seems that all of them are already engaged in conversations.
The only unengaged person is Park Jihyo, who has somehow found herself sitting in one of Soyeon’s artistically uncomfortable patio chairs in relative privacy of the balcony, holding a glass in her hand. Unlike at the KMAs where she was immediately swarmed, here she either isn’t seeking out company or isn’t finding people who want to talk to her. Chaeyoung figures the rest of Soyeon’s friends feel the same way about her as Chaeyoung does. Did.
Why would Soyeon have invited her here? As much as her friend tended to be a brown-noser, it was hard to actually get invited into her circles. She was careful about who she let in her life, and to be invited into her home was a feat that Chaeyoung didn’t think anyone could manage in one night. Was there really something about Park Jihyo that Soyeon had seen? What was Chaeyoung missing?
It's as that thought crosses her mind that Chaeyoung gets caught staring. Jihyo’s eyes lift, as if aware that she’s being watched. Her eyebrows rise in surprise and a wry smile curls her upper lip. Before she can think about it, Chaeyoung finds herself walking over, sliding the balcony door shut behind her.
“Come to tell me I’m a fake fan again?” Jihyo asks.
Her tone is dry and mocking and Chaeyoung should feel hurt by it but instead it makes something in her spark pleasantly. This she can relate to – annoyance, frustration at being misunderstood. She feels it herself every day and it makes Jihyo just a little bit easier to handle.
“Why is ‘Superstar’ your favorite song?” Chaeyoung asks.
Jihyo rolls her eyes and uncrosses her legs so that she can turn to face Chaeyoung a little better.
“Going to tell me all the reasons it shouldn’t be?”
“Maybe,” Chaeyoung says honestly. “If they’re the wrong reasons.”
“You think it’s up to you to decide how or why people get to enjoy your music?” Jihyo asks.
The question isn’t a challenge. It could have been if Jihyo’s tone weren’t so clearly and openly curious, but there’s no malice in it at all. Chaeyoung considers carefully. It’s a loaded question. She wonders if there’s a correct answer or if this is one of those things that will always be up for debate.
“When I put out music, I’m sharing a piece of myself,” she says. “And people can decide whether they want to enjoy it or not. I don’t care if they hate it. But sometimes people decide how they feel about my songs without understanding the piece of me that I put into it. And that pisses me off.”
Jihyo leans back into her seat with a smug smile.
“That’s why I like ‘Superstar’,” she says simply.
Chaeyoung tilts her head skeptically. Jihyo takes a deep breath and then starts to talk.
“It’s a brilliant song. The song is pop-y. It’s consumable. But the lyrics aren’t. They’re not easy to understand at first. In order to understand them you have to actually stop and listen to them. You can’t just put the song in the background and come away knowing what it’s about. You sample Amy Winehouse in the bridge, subtly but if you listen it’s there. She was possibly one of the most misunderstood artists of the modern generation. Someone whose whole being was taken by the media and broken to pieces and ripped apart up until it killed her. But only people who know music will recognize the sample and only people who really listen carefully will hear the sample to begin with. The whole song is a trap. The people who listen superficially, who don’t care to really understand it, they’ll think it’s all fun and games and they’ll sing and dance along to it and tell you it’s their favorite. But by saying that, they’re only showing off how they don’t really know you.”
Jihyo’s eyes glitter as she speaks, her hands getting involved in her explanation enthusiastically to the point where she almost spills her drink. This girl loves music. She doesn’t just listen to it, she consumes it. Takes it pieces apart and analyzes it to understand how each song is built and made to get at the fundamental message the writers were trying to convey.
“If you know that then why did you say it’s your favorite?” Chaeyoung asks.
“Because it is,” Jihyo answers simply. “It’s a brilliant song. The construction is perfect. The subtlety of the sample is exactly what it needs to be, and the lyrics are just obscure enough. They’re not hard to analyze if you actually try, but you do have to try. I mean it’s just… amazing how well you were able to balance it all to make this track. And the fact that it did blow up is even more poetic.”
“I wish it hadn’t,” Chaeyoung admits quietly.
She’s felt it acutely ever since the song reached number one on all the charts in Korea, but she hasn’t actually said it out loud to anyone before. It feels selfish, or ungrateful maybe, to admit that. But she thinks of all the people who have listened to this part of her now and who haven’t understood but who now think they know her. Her concerts used to be packed with people who knew instinctively what parts of her songs to sing along to and what parts were hers to sing alone. They would find her after her shows to ask her questions about how she came up with a specific lines and tell her that no one had ever summed up their feelings quite like she had before. Now they show up with sharpies and selfie-ready poses and tell her that her music is just ‘so fun’.
Jihyo doesn’t seem put off by the statement. If anything, her expression softens a little and she gestures at Chaeyoung to take the seat next to her. She does, doing her best to get comfortable in Soyeon’s terrible furniture.
“Is that why you were a dick to me at the KMAs after-party?”
Chaeyoung freezes. She didn’t expect to get called out like that. She had hoped that by engaging Jihyo again and by carefully listening to her explanation, that maybe it would be enough for forgiveness. But Jihyo is apparently the direct type.
“I’m sorry,” Chaeyoung says, meaning it very sincerely. “I just… was tired. And I don’t mean that as like a general excuse. The award show was draining in all the wrong ways. My fans weren’t there. Yours were. I could hear them but mine… a lot of them think shows like that are bullsh*t and they’re right, but it means they don’t come. So I had to perform all my ‘best hits’ which are all the songs that the public has latched on to but don’t understand at all, in front of people who don’t care about the rest of my music or about what I'm trying to say. And so when you… when you said you liked ‘Superstar’ I assumed you were just like everyone else.”
“I figured,” Jihyo says. “But you know… for someone who hates being misunderstood, you didn’t really make much of an effort to listen to me.”
It’s a fair statement. So fair that Chaeyoung doesn’t have anything to rebut with.
“Sorry,” she says again.
Jihyo nods and then takes a long swing of her drink.
“People give idols a lot of sh*t,” she says. “About the way we interact with our fans. They say that we give them too much fanservice and we let them get away with too much. And sometimes they’re right. But sometimes… sometimes we look a fan in the eye, and we can see, that they’re just trying to connect with someone. That’s what it’s all about right? Human connection is what drives us. So we do our best to give them just a taste of it if we can.”
Chaeyoung listens carefully, though it seems that the longer Jihyo talks, the less she’s talking to her and more just thinking out loud.
“So when I approached you that night, that’s all I was looking for. I’ve listened to all your music, and I feel like I understand you, at least a little bit. But more than that… I feel like you feel the same way I do about a lot of things and I just… maybe this was presumptuous of me, but I just wanted to talk to someone about it.”
“About what?” Chaeyoung asks.
“About what it feels like to be consumed. To be eaten up and digested and spit out and reformed by the media and the public until you don’t know who you are anymore. About feeling like you’re screaming in an empty room while they watch you with a microscope. Do you know what I mean?”
Chaeyoung nods. Screaming in an empty room. That’s how her KMA’s performance felt. The room hadn’t been empty by any stretch of the imagination, but it had been empty of people who knew her. Who truly appreciated her. Who could hear what she was trying to scream out in her music.
“But you didn’t want that connection. You had already made up your mind about me,” Jihyo says. “Is it because I’m an idol?”
“Huh?”
“Was it because I’m an idol that you didn’t want to listen?”
“I… In part,” Chaeyoung finds herself telling the truth.
“Just in part?”
“Um… a large part.”
Jihyo chuckles but it’s a dark sound, bleak and dry. Chaeyoung feels profoundly, again, that she’s disappointing her.
“It’s not your fault.” Jihyo says with a sigh. “There’s an image we have to portray. And I wouldn’t say it’s fake… but it’s not the whole truth either. Because idols, at the end of the day, above all else, need to be consumable. So if I say that my favorite artist, possibly of all time, is an underground rapper who writes about the dark side of the music industry … people wouldn’t like that. You must have noticed, right? No female idol ever says a rapper is their favorite artist unless it’s one of the big western ones: Kanye West, Drake, Meghan Thee Stallion. Those are okay. But no one ever mentions Beenzino or Kid Milli or Tablo. But we like them too, you know? A lot of us do. We just can’t say it.”
As Chaeyoung listens she realizes that Jihyo is smart. Very smart. She pays attention to the world around her and analyzes everything and knows how to put it into words. Chaeyoung starts to think that she could listen to her talk for hours.
“Is it worth it?” Chaeyoung asks carefully. “To hide away parts of yourself like that? To not be true to yourself all the time? It doesn’t bother you?”
Jihyo regards Chaeyoung seriously.
“You can’t be yourself 100% of the time when you’re in the spotlight. This is true for you as much as it is for me. You’ll get more leeway as a rapper but if you want longevity, you’ll need to hide parts of yourself. Not the bad parts necessarily in your case, since a lot of rappers live off the press around their bad habits, but the parts that don’t fit your image. You have a Hello Kitty doll in your room? Hide it. Your favorite color is pink? No, it’s not, it’s black. You don’t like to drink? Yes, you do.”
Jihyo pauses to take a sip of her drink, but Chaeyoung can feel that she’s not done so she doesn’t interrupt.
“That’s the life of a celebrity,” she says somewhat darkly. “But you know how it is. I know you do. You wrote about it in ‘Farfetched’.”
Chaeyoung’s jaw drops at the sudden, very apt reference to her music. She leans in closer to Jihyo subconsciously. She wants to breathe in every word this woman is saying, wants to keep hearing the way she seems to put every single thought Chaeyoung has into words with just a couple movements of her lips.
“I still get to tell my story though,” Chaeyoung says, not because she wants to argue but simply to continue the conversation. She wants to hear more of what Jihyo has to say. “I write my own lyrics. I get to produce my own songs. I can still, at least within the confines of my music, be myself. You don’t… you don’t get that at all. Do you even get to choose what songs you get to sing?”
Jihyo leans forward as well, mirroring Chaeyoung’s position, resting her elbows on her knees. Her eyes are bright and sparkling and her smile is soft.
“Nowadays we do,” she says. “At debut no, but in the last couple of years the company has allowed us a little more control. But you’re right, we’re still singing other people’s songs. Sometimes with our own lyrics… sometimes not. But that… I don’t mind. Honestly. If I was doing solo stuff then it might bother me more but when I’m singing with the group my goal in music is different from yours.”
“What’s your goal?”
Jihyo’s soft smile breaks into a wide grin. It’s the same one that Chaeyoung had assumed was fake at the KMAs after-party, on the billboards, and on that poster in the studio building. But she thinks now that it might be real.
“To make people happy,” she says. “Not all music needs to be dark and introspective. I mean, I like that kind of music, but I also like the kind of music that lifts my spirits. You know? The music that makes me smile and laugh and want to dance. Your music is about relief through expression, mine is about relief through comfort. If I can make someone smile, then I’ve achieved what I set out to achieve.”
“Okay, sure,” Chaeyoung says. “But what about connection? When my fans – my real fans, not the ones chasing the trends – listen to my music, they see themselves in it. That’s why they like it. You said you felt that way yourself. Do you not want to make that connection?”
“You know,” Jihyo answers, her lips curling into an almost smug expression, as if she already knows she’s going to win this one. “One could argue that just the act of making someone else smile is a far deeper connection than any. That’s what we all look for in other people: to find someone who makes us happy. You may say we’re looking for understanding but why are we looking for understanding? So that we feel less alone. And what better way to feel less alone than with shared happiness?”
Chaeyoung licks her bottom lip. She wants to keep the conversation going, wants to keep arguing. They aren’t really arguing though are they? There’s a softness in Jihyo’s words and there’s no bite to Chaeyoung’s. They’re just talking, connecting. It’s electric. As she searches for something to say, she realizes that she has no clue how long she’s been on this balcony, has no clue what is happening in the party on the other side of the glass door. She only knows that the timbre of Jihyo’s voice takes on a deeper edge when she talks seriously. She wants to hear more.
“Don’t you feel pent up though? Like you have a story to tell that you can’t?”
Jihyo’s expression turns bittersweet. She leans away from Chaeyoung again, taking a sip of her drink and sighing.
“Yes,” she admits quietly. “I can’t deny that. But that’s the price I have to pay. It’s worth it to get to sing with my members and to make people smile. I’ll keep writing my stories for myself and maybe one day, when Twice disbands or I get to do some solo stuff, I’ll put it out there. But for now… I’m content.”
She doesn’t quite sound content to Chaeyoung, but she’s not going to point that out. She hadn’t intended on upsetting Jihyo. She had just wanted to understand. Now that she’s starting to get to know her, she finds herself itching to know everything about how she thinks. It’s like she’d dipped her toe in a pool on a hot summer’s day only to find it at the perfect temperature and she just wants to submerge herself.
“If you did solo stuff,” Chaeyoung says. “What would you sing about?”
Jihyo purses her lips thoughtfully.
“I think I’d write about moments like these,” she says. “Moments where I say what I want to say, and I’m understood. Moments where I don’t feel like I’m screaming in an empty room anymore.”
“I hope you get a solo soon then,” Chaeyoung says earnestly. “I… I’d love to hear what you have to say.”
“You and me both,” Jihyo says.
“People say that you are the voice of the new generation,” the interviewer reads of the teleprompter just over Chaeyoung’s shoulder. “What do you think the new generation is trying to say?”
Chaeyoung wants to roll her eyes. Elle Korea had asked her to do a cover and she’d wanted to decline. The overlap of her fans and Elle’s subscriber base had to be close to zero but Mina had insisted. It was good exposure, good press, and they would pay well. And as stubborn as Chaeyoung could be at times, Mina was more than capable of matching her when needed.
The photoshoot had been fine. The clothes they had put Chaeyoung in were surprisingly appropriate for her image and comfortable and they hadn’t asked her to do any crazy poses or anything weird. The instruction from the photographer had been for her to just be herself… whatever that meant. He’d apparently liked what she’d come up with and hadn’t given too many notes.
This interview though… three questions in and Chaeyoung wants to rip her hair out. What the hell does she know about the new generation? Sure, she’s one of them but she can’t speak for all of them. Sometimes she feels like she can barely speak for herself. Still, the interviewer is looking at her as if she might have something insightful to answer.
“I have no clue what they’re saying,” Chaeyoung answers, and out of the corner of her eye she sees Mina shake her head and sigh. “I’m just trying to tell my own story. If people can relate, then I think that’s great. But I’m not trying to represent anyone.”
The interviewer plasters on a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes and nods.
“Of course,” she answers. “Well, it seems even without trying it, your work has reached a lot of people. ‘Superstar’ has become the most played Korean hip-hop song of all time on Spotify. That’s a really impressive landmark for someone of your age. How does that make you feel?”
Chaeyoung tries to keep her expression pleasant as she fights the urge to grit her teeth.
“It’s really heartwarming to have so many people enjoying my music,” she says. “I appreciate everyone who has supported me.”
Mina nods her approval behind the interviewer’s shoulder, though her expression is still a little pinched.
“Of course. And one last question that I’m sure your fans are very interested in. When can we expect a new album?”
“I’m working on writing some stuff right now,” Chaeyoung says, doing her best to stay vague. “Nothing soon but know that it’s in the works.”
“Well, I’m sure your fans are on the edges of their seats. I know that I’m very much looking forward to seeing what you release next. Thank you so much for being here today.”
“Thank you for having me.”
There’s a pause and then the camera director tells them the camera is off and Chaeyoung slumps in her chair. Despite how much she had gushed over Chaeyoung when the camera had been on, the interviewer doesn’t even glance at her as she stands to talk to the staff. Mina comes over to Chaeyoung, her phone in hand.
“Not your worst interview,” she says, which is high praise coming from her. “But you shouldn’t have said that stuff about not representing the younger generation. People will find it alienating if you draw lines like that.”
Chaeyoung doesn’t bother answering. Mina won’t be convinced no matter what she says, and it’s not like she can go back in time and un-say it.
“Please tell me that I’m done for the day,” Chaeyoung says.
She’s pretty sure that this was the last thing she remembered seeing on her schedule.
“You are,” Mina says sounding disappointed by the question. “Go change and I’ll drive you home. Do you want to pick up food on the way?’
“Sure,” Chaeyoung says. “Can we get-“
“No,” Mina says. “I’m getting you something healthy. No arguments.”
Chaeyoung fights the urge to bite back a scathing remark. It’s not like she needs to lose weight. Her metabolism has always been her best friend. But Mina is worried about her not getting enough vitamins. It makes her feel infantilized and only makes her want fried chicken even more. But she’s starting to learn which of Mina’s facial expressions mean that she won’t be changing her mind.
“Fine,” she huffs.
She changes quickly, thanking the staff as she goes, and falls into step behind Mina as she leads her out of the production studio. Chaeyoung fumbles with her bag as she walks, trying her best to get her headphones out so that she can block out the noise of the people shuffling through the hallway. There must be someone else shooting here, she thinks, as she watches staff hurriedly move around set pieces and racks of clothing. She’s too tired to be curious though and just blindly keeps her eyes on Mina’s expensive blazer as she leads her through the hallways.
She turns a corner after Mina only to run directly into someone.
“Ah, sorry,” she says automatically.
“Chaeyoung. Fancy meeting you here.”
Jihyo’s voice is warm like Chaeyoung remembers it. Somehow the fog and frustration of the day evaporate upon hearing it. Her eyes focus immediately on Jihyo’s face. The first thing she notices is that Jihyo is wearing a ton of make-up, clearly freshly applied, the lines around her eyes still dark and sharp. She’s wearing some shimmery, glittery outfit that is almost blinding as it reflects the cool fluorescent lights of the hallway.
“Uh, yeah,” Chaeyoung finds herself at a loss for words.
Jihyo doesn’t seem to mind, smile widening. Chaeyoung slowly becomes aware that the other members of Twice are standing behind Jihyo watching the interaction. Jihyo seems to notice at the same time.
“You guys go ahead,” she says. “I’ll be quick.”
The other girls nod and Chaeyoung bows to them as they pass, as she should with any sunbae in the industry and they politely bow back.
“Are you here shooting something?” Jihyo asks.
“Interview,” Chaeyoung answers. “You?”
“Music video,” Jihyo says, “Our comeback is soon.”
“Right, well. I’ll let you get to that,” Chaeyoung says.
Her words feel awkward to her own ears but she’s genuinely at a loss for what else to say. The easy conversation that had flowed between them for hours on the balcony of Soyeon’s party seems completely out of reach now. It was ages ago and now Chaeyoung is almost wondering if she imagined it.
“Hold on,” Jihyo says. “I… I was actually wondering if I could get your number?”
“Huh?”
“I mean to ask after we talked at Soyeon’s party but then you were busy talking to Young-ji and I missed out.”
“Oh, um, sure,” Chaeyoung says, and she takes Jihyo’s phone from her and carefully inputs her number.
“I have to go!” Jihyo says as she takes the phone back. “But I’ll text you!”
She brushes past Chaeyoung, leaving her feeling a little like she’d been hit by a small tornado. Mina is looking at her with a curious expression.
“Since when do you know Park Jihyo?” she asks.
Chaeyoung just shrugs. There’s a glimmer in Mina’s eyes that Chaeyoung doesn’t like.
“She’s a good connection to have,” Mina muses. “Try to stay close to her.”
“f*ck off,” Chaeyoung snaps.
Mina blinks twice and her jaw drops. Then her expression hardens. Chaeyoung expects her to say something, to finally vent out her frustrations at having to deal with Chaeyoung’s bullsh*t but instead she lets out a slow breath through her nose and turns on heel. Chaeyoung isn’t sure where her own anger came from, but she can still feel it boiling under her skin, and she feels a streak of vindication in Mina’s taken aback expression.
She’s tired from the day. From having to fake everything about herself for the purposes of selling an image she’s not even sure she believes in. From feeling like her every move is being controlled by her PR team, her label, and at the head of it all, Mina. It all makes her feel like she doesn’t know what’s real.
She doesn’t want to question things with Jihyo. She doesn’t want to use her for whatever manipulations Mina is dreaming up in her head. She doesn’t want Jihyo’s connections, doesn’t want her money or her fame. She just wants to talk to her. To have even a hint of the genuine connection they had formed that one night.
She fumes all the way to the car. Fumes even more once she’s in the car since she knows she’s going to have to endure a very awkward ride home. The tension is suffocating. Mina was never talkative to begin with but somehow her silence feels heavier than usual. Chaeyoung doesn’t want to apologize. She’s not ready yet and isn’t sure Mina deserves an apology anyway. To suggest that the only value Jihyo might have is to advance her career… Chaeyoung wonders if Mina even sees her as a person or just as a peg in a money-making machine.
“What was it that made you mad?”
Mina’s voice catches Chaeyoung off guard. The question, after Chaeyoung has had enough time to process it surprises her even more.
“What?”
Mina takes a deep breath, her fingers tightening visibly on the steering wheel.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” she says cautiously. “I don’t want to do it again. So I would like to know what it was that I did that upset you.”
Chaeyoung wants to scoff and say that she should know. That she can figure it out herself. She wants to say something scathing and harsh and vent off all the frustration that she can feel pent up in her chest. But she can tell that Mina is trying and it would be better to not make an enemy of her manager if possible.
“My friends aren’t pawns to be used to advance my career,” Chaeyoung says, trying to keep her tone even, but she can hear the venom that spills through despite her best attempts. “I won’t use them for their connections, I won’t take advantage of their status. They’re my friends and that’s it. That applies to Jihyo and to Soyeon and to Suga.”
Mina nods slowly and her fingers relax a little on the steering wheel.
“I understand. I apologize for insinuating that you should. I… I’m glad you have friends that you care about like that.”
The apology sounds genuine and Chaeyoung feels a sort of release in her chest that Mina might actually understand where she’s coming from and isn’t just saying it to placate her.
Jihyo has a confidence about her that is absolutely alluring and makes Chaeyoung feel like she has to stay on her toes to keep up. To see that melt away as she stares wide-eyed at Chaeyoung’s studio is flattering to say the least. Though it’s nowhere near the first time Jihyo has been in a room like this one, she keeps her hands close to her sides and only makes small movements as if she’s afraid of touching anything. It’s very silly, Chaeyoung thinks, but it is also impossibly endearing.
When Jihyo had finally used her number, after two days of an apparently grueling music video shoot, the first thing she had asked was about Chaeyoung’s creative process. How did she come up with the music that she ended up releasing? Was it lyrics first? Did she produce the music first? Was it both at once, a song crafted and woven on the spot? Chaeyoung hadn’t had a good answer. It depended on the song. It depended on her mood. It depended on what she wanted to say. It depended on if Suga was involved or not. Jihyo, unsatisfied, had continued to push in that intelligent and probing way over hers and somehow or another had gotten herself invited into Chaeyoung’s recording studio.
It's not the first time Chaeyoung had invited a friend to watch her futz around with her DAW but certainly Jihyo is the fastest. It requires a certain amount of trust to allow someone to see her at work. Her music requires vulnerability and not just anyone is allowed to witness the process. For the longest time it had only been Jeongyeon, and then Suga. Even now it depends on Chaeyoung’s mood whether or not Soyeon is invited.
But Jihyo… it’s only their fourth time meeting if she counts both the first time, where Chaeyoung made a fool of herself, and the ten second run-in in the hallway last week. Other than the steadily growing text chain between them, they’ve only really had one meaningful conversation. Chaeyoung isn’t sure what possessed her to invite Jihyo here. But she thinks it’s worth it as Jihyo looks at one of the many notebooks Chaeyoung has strewn around that just says ‘Lyrics’ on the front as if they might hold the secrets to the universe. That one has a VI scrawled on the front, the roman numerals fading with use. That notebook is nearing the end of its life… she’ll need to get a new one soon.
“Do you record all your stuff here?” Jihyo asks as she looks around.
Chaeyoung has to imagine this studio looks different from the ones at JYP headquarters. Probably smaller but also more lived-in. This room is, for all intents and purposes, hers and Suga’s. While technically other people within the label are welcome to use it, there’s an unspoken agreement that they’ll use one of the other two recording studios when needed. She and Suga are protective of their processes and they’re the ones pulling in most of the money so when they had requested to have uninhibited access to this one, the higher ups had backed them immediately.
“These days, yeah.”
Jihyo’s expression can only be described as reverent.
“And these notebooks have your lyrics?”
Chaeyoung fights the urge to slam her hand protectively down on the notebook Jihyo is looking at though Jihyo has made no move to even touch it, much less open it. Still, her innermost thoughts are contained between the lines of that little book. Someone smart enough could read it and understand everything there is to know about her and Jihyo is certainly smart enough. Chaeyoung is already terrified of how quickly she has been willing to let Jihyo into this studio… letting her read her unfiltered lyrics is a level of vulnerability that Chaeyoung isn’t ready for. Might never be ready for.
“Yeah,” she says. “Most of the time they end up there first and get edited as I start to produce.”
Jihyo nods, still looking around curiously.
“You can sit.”
Chaeyoung gestures at the second chair in the room. The one that isn’t currently holding two balled up hoodies and some sheet music. Suga is a lot neater about his space. He complains constantly about having to share it with Chaeyoung but has given up on trying to change her habits. Jihyo takes the seat carefully.
Chaeyoung haphazardly tosses her hoodies on the bench behind her and throws the sheet music into one of the many folders she has scattered across the room. She estimates a 50% chance that she’ll be able to find it again. But sheet music isn’t really the name of the game for her. Instead, she shifts until her hands are on her computer, the DAW software in front of her and the nerves immediately flow out of her. She starts to click around slowly, pulling together the draft she had been messing around with. It’s possible it won’t become a releasable song, but she’s learned along the way that not everything she makes has to be good enough to release. Some of it can just be practice.
She pulls her headphones on, leaving one ear slightly off just in case Jihyo asks her something but turning her focus nearly entirely to the song. She’s not quite happy with it, partially because she still hasn’t figured out the exact mood that it’s supposed to convey. She messes with the sounds carefully, adjusting and editing until it starts to take a form she likes. She leans heavier into the base but hums a higher melody that she thinks will sound good when combined. She likes this kind of sound. Usually, a low instrumental contrasts nicely with her naturally higher vocal tone. She hums a little bit more and decides she likes the curling melody leaving her lips and flicks on the microphone by the DAW to record. The sound won’t be as good as if she was in the booth, but it’s good enough for a guide track.
She hums again, with a little more intent, recording herself carefully and then adjusting her recording with the instrumental. There aren’t lyrics yet. But she’s starting to feel what they would be about. Something hopeful, she thinks, with a tinge of uncertainty. She messes with the track a little more, recording some harmonies and expanding the melody into a chorus. If she ends up writing lyrics for this, it’ll be one of her softer rap songs she thinks, less staccato and more talk rapping. Could be good enough for a B-side with enough fine-tuning. Or not. She’s not sure yet.
Her throat starts to feel dry, and she reaches over to her iced coffee, turning her body and remembering with a jolt that she’s not alone in the studio. She feels bad that she forgot Jihyo was there. Terrible actually because she had invited her over and to ignore her while she messed around was really awfully rude of her. She opens her mouth to apologize but Jihyo’s expression when their eyes meet stops her from saying anything at all.
“Can I hear what you were working on?” Jihyo asks quietly.
She’s talking as if she’s afraid to interrupt. Chaeyoung realizes that not only had Jihyo been forced to watch for… an hour and a half the clock tells her, but also she hadn’t even been able to hear what Chaeyoung had been doing without a headset of her own.
“Yeah,” Chaeyoung says, fumbling as finds a spare set of headphones and hands them to her. “Here.”
Jihyo places them on her ears and then looks at Chaeyoung expectantly. Chaeyoung plays the music from the beginning and, as Jihyo listens, she fights the urge to fidget. She’s not used to feeling this unmoored when showing people her music, even if it is unfinished. Suga has heard some terrible stuff from her but that was necessary for his role as her main person to go to for music advice. This is different though. There’s something inside her aching for Jihyo’s approval. If she doesn’t like it, Chaeyoung isn’t sure what she’ll do.
As the music plays, Chaeyoung begins to note with a cresting feeling of disappointment every place that isn’t good enough, where the synths aren’t blended correctly, where her vocals tremble slightly. It’s not stuff she’s supposed to worry about on a first draft but-
“It’s nice,” Jihyo says. “I like it.”
“It’s nothing. Just messing around.”
“Your ‘just messing around’ is better than half the artists out there,” Jihyo says, and it doesn’t sound like a compliment, just a statement. “It’s not as good as the stuff you release, sure, but I can hear it… the emotion that you’re trying to convey even without all the polish. It’s really impressive.”
“What emotion did you hear?” she asks.
She’s curious because the mood hadn’t even been fully resolved in her own mind. Jihyo tilts her head thoughtfully.
“Hmmm… like… it’s hard to put into words, but it’s like when you’re waiting for something but you’re not sure if it’ll be a good thing or a bad thing,” Jihyo says. “While I’m listening, I feel like the song could go either way, either towards something happy or… something sad. Is that how you’re feeling right now?”
Jihyo says the words uncertainly, but she has no reason to. It’s spot-on, putting Chaeyoung’s feelings into words better than Chaeyoung could have in that moment.
“I’m sorry I judged you when we first met."
It’s not like the regret has been hanging over her head or anything. After their conversation at Soyeon’s Chaeyoung had known she’d been forgiven but there’s moments like these where she’s reminded that she really was far too hasty in her judgement of Jihyo. Jihyo is far, far too smart.
“I think you understand music better than anyone I’ve met. You… you’re right about the emotion. About what I’m feeling. To hear that in this half-baked track… it shows how much you listen, how much you care.”
Jihyo grins at her, eyes twinkling and there’s still some of that hero worship Chaeyoung had seen in her when they’d first met but there’s something else as well, something warmer more personal. It makes Chaeyoung's cheeks heat up.
“Maybe you’re just really good at expressing yourself.”
“I’m not saying that your music is pointless,” Chaeyoung says, doing her best to not spill her soju even as she uses the glass to emphasize her point. “I’m just saying that it doesn’t say anything.”
“It does,” Jihyo argues.
“Just clichés. Statements that have been said a million times before and-“
“Human beings have existed for like thousands of years. There’s 7 billion of us on the planet. Do you really think there’s a unique thought out there?”
“I-“
Chaeyoung finds herself backed into a corner again. It happens every time she and Jihyo meet up like this. Jihyo starts a conversation that turns into a debate and Chaeyoung is too taken with her shining intelligence to notice when she’s being talked into a trap.
“I think what I write is… unique,” she says weakly.
“What you write isn’t unique,” Jihyo says, and from anyone else it would be an insult, but Chaeyoung knows how much Jihyo loves her music, how much she respects it. She waits for whatever Jihyo will say next before getting offended. “But it is yours which is what makes it unique. Because even if there isn’t a new thought under the sun, you haven’t existed before.”
“Okay, but your music isn’t yours, it’s your groups or your producers or whatever but I don’t feel Park Jihyo in it.”
“That’s because you aren’t meant to,” Jihyo argues. “You’re meant to see the group and you do. That’s what people like about us. Our personalities, the group’s personality is reflected in the music. The producers are actually really good at that.”
“But when you have an average of five people’s personalities, then you can’t get deep into any of them. I can’t listen to your music and know you.”
“And why do you want to know me, Son Chaeyoung?” Jihyo asks. “Am I that interesting to you?”
The honest answer almost spills out of Chaeyoung’s lips. The answer being that, yes, she wants to know Jihyo more desperately than she’s wanted to know anyone before. That every time Jihyo speaks, instead of satisfying that need, she just wants to know more. That these late night conversations in Jihyo’s apartment or in her studio are quickly becoming the highlight of her life. She catches herself just in time.
“I’m talking about your fans,” she says hoarsely, and she ignores the way Jihyo laughs at her.
“Are you saying you’re not my fan?”
“Not right now, I’m not,” Chaeyoung grumbles and Jihyo just laughs harder.
“Guess, I’ll have to keep trying to get you to like me then.”
“We’re thinking a new release by the end of the summer,” Jihoon says. “Do you think you can manage a full album, or should we advertise an EP? A full album would be better if you can manage it. The last release was just a single so people will probably be expecting more and-“
“I can’t just churn out music,” Chaeyoung huffs.
Jihoon sighs.
“I understand that and that’s why we put flexibility in your contract when we signed you, but you will owe us an EP at the very least by the end of the year per the terms we agreed on. As much as I would love to just support your music blindly, we need to make money. If we don’t, we’ll go bankrupt, and you won’t get to keep your nice studio or fund your expensive headphone buying habits.”
Chaeyoung huffs. There are times she wishes she’d stayed independent. There are other times where she remembers that her headphones cost 800,000 won, money earned directly from the multibillion won deal she’d signed and realizes that she should be grateful that Jihoon at least understands music better than the other CEO’s who had tried to lure her into their grasps.
“Just start making music,” he says with a sigh. “If all you can manage is an EP by December, I’ll take it, but a full album by August would be ideal.”
Chaeyoung nods reluctantly and Jihoon smiles.
“There’s something else,” he says carefully. “You don’t have to do this. It’s not in your contract and I know it’s not the kind of thing you normally want to do, but the offer is there.”
“What offer?”
“There’s an idol group that would like you to produce for them. You’ve heard of Le Sserafim right?”
“No.”
“Oh well, they’re a group under Hybe and-“
“No, I know who they are. I just meant I’m not going to do it.”
Jihoon doesn’t look surprised, but he does seem a little disappointed if his small sigh is anything to go by.
“The money would be good,” he says, “and the exposure too. Just think about it-“
“No,” she says. “Nothing against idols,” (Jihyo comes to mind as she speaks and she does her best to brush her dark eyes out of her mind), “But I’m not stooping to writing cotton candy tracks-“
“Le Sserafim is hardly cotton candy. They’re looking for a proper trap song-“
“A K-pop trap song,” Chaeyoung says. “Made to suit the masses. I won’t do it. Sorry. I don’t care how good the money or exposure is.”
Jihoon’s sigh this time isn’t small, but he raises his hands in defeat.
“Fine. Then get writing on the album you owe me. I don’t want to have to sue you for breach of contract.”
“Do you ever feel like you’re barreling towards something, but you don’t know what?” Jihyo asks.
Her voice is slurring a little as she tips back the first shot of her third bottle of soju. Comeback schedules are hard apparently, stressful. They require large amounts of alcohol at the end. That’s what Jihyo had said when she’d invited Chaeyoung over to her apartment. Not the first time, but the last couple of times hadn’t involved this much alcohol. Sure, Jihyo liked to drink but she knows her limits and normally keeps to them. Tonight she doesn’t seem to be minding them at all and she’s dragging Chaeyoung down with her. While she normally considers herself to be very good at following Jihyo’s musings, her head is swirling and she’s having trouble just processing her words right now.
“Maybe,” she answers. “I guess… everyone is barreling towards something, right? Like… the future is always head of us.”
Jihyo giggles.
“No, I mean something big. Meaningful,” she says.
“I- I don’t… I don’t know.”
“How drunk are you, Son Chaeyoung?”
“Umm, I’m just a little… I’m… my head is spinning.”
Jihyo laughs again, this time the sound brighter and louder. Chaeyoung sits up from where she’d been half slumping on the couch to watch the way her cheeks are flushed and her eyes are shining.
“You’re a lightweight.”
Chaeyoung just nods her agreement. No use in arguing. It’s not her fault that she’s only barely 159 cm and weighs 45 kg on a good day. Though… it’s not like Jihyo is that much taller than her. More muscular, though. Chaeyoung notices her forearms flex as she pours herself another shot. Maybe that’s what’s helping her process the alcohol better.
“That’s okay,” Jihyo says softly after throwing back the shot and depositing the glass on the table and shifting a little closer to Chaeyoung. “I like drinking with you anyway.”
The warm timbre of her deeper voice sends a tingle up Chaeyoung’s spine and she’s suddenly hyperaware that they’re both leaning in towards each other, faces only a few inches apart. Jihyo’s face is suddenly the only thing Chaeyoung can see. She feels her pulse start to race and knows vaguely that her breathing has become a little shallow in an effort to not disturb the air between them.
Jihyo’s eyes sharpen a little and Chaeyoung can’t tell what she’s responding to, whether it’s the change in Chaeyoung’s breathing or whether she has also realized suddenly how close they are to each other. Her eyes are so big and dark and Chaeyoung suddenly feels trapped in them. Her mouth has gone dry, and she instinctively licks her lips.
“I feel like that sometimes,” Chaeyoung says. “Like I’m barreling towards something big… I feel it when- when I’m with you.”
Jihyo’s breath seems to stutter or maybe it’s Chaeyoung’s own breathing. She can’t tell.
“With me? Why me?
Chaeyoung is too gone to realize the danger of the question.
“I feel like I’m at the edge of a cliff. And I could… I could step back and not have to look down and not have to worry about… about falling but then I wouldn’t get that exhilarating feeling, you know? The adrenaline? I want that feeling, but I wish I wasn’t afraid of falling.”
“You really have a way with words,” Jihyo says and she’s close enough now that the words send puffs of air across Chaeyoung’s cheeks.
“Thank you.”
“What if… what if I was also at the cliff,” Jihyo asks. “What if I promised to catch you if you fall?”
The words spark something in Chaeyoung’s hazy mind through the weight of the alcohol and she finds her heavy limbs pushing her forward. Her lips meet Jihyo’s and Chaeyoung is gone.
Chaeyoung is more than used to waking up in beds that aren’t her own. Comfortable with the cut and run routine that’s expected on mornings after. Grab the clothes and tiptoe out before they wake. Call Mina to come pick her up before some paparazzi take pictures of her in clothes from the night before. Leave without a trace before they can try and get her to stay.
But Jihyo isn’t some girl from a club and waking up next to her, Chaeyoung worries about the opposite. What if Jihyo doesn’t want her to stay? What if this decision, made at the height of drunkenness, had not been something Jihyo had actually wanted? Will she regret it? Will she see Chaeyoung differently? Will things change between them? Chaeyoung doesn’t think she’ll ever forgive herself if the comfort and openness they had built turns awkward when tainted with the compilations of a sexual relationship.
Chaeyoung tries not to panic as her eyes trace Jihyo’s bare shoulders, the morning light reflecting beautifully off the sculpted lines of her back. She holds herself tense and still, terrified that any move on her part, even to just shift her weight will rouse Jihyo and bring her closer to that moment when she’ll wake and remember what they did. She doesn't think she can just wait and watch Jihyo’s expression turn to one of regret. The longer she lies there in total silence, the more the anxiety brews in her stomach. Eventually, she decides she can’t stand it. The anticipation will kill her. The nerves are already making her feel like she might throw up.
She does her best to move slowly and carefully, so as not to jostle the bed and manages to get to standing. The light of the sun seeping through the cracks in the blinds is just enough for Chaeyoung to locate her clothes - pants and underwear in a pile by the foot of the bed, shirt tossed haphazardly on the dresser. She dresses herself quickly but quietly and thinks that maybe she will succeed in her escape, but as she reaches for the door knob she hears a soft sigh from the bed and the sounds of rustling sheets. She turns to see Jihyo rolling on her side, hand reaching out to the space that Chaeyoung had occupied not long ago. Slowly, Jihyo blinks her way to wakefulness and a frown form on her brow.
Chaeyoung is frozen in place. Escaping isn’t an option anymore but being caught mid-escape is embarrassing. Maybe she should just dash out now so that she doesn’t have to look Jihyo in the eyes. But she thinks if she does that, she'll never be able to face Jihyo again. So she just waits until Jihyo finds her. When their eyes do meet, Jihyo gives her a wry smile that Chaeyoung is starting to recognize as the beginning of some comment that will leave her reeling for at least the next few hours.
“Making a run for it?” Jihyo asks.
There’s something in her tone, despite the half-co*cked smile, that makes Chaeyoung feel guilty.
“No,” she lies. “I didn’t want to wake you. I have a meeting.”
Jihyo regards her carefully and then her smile turns softer. She’s a vision with her tussled hair and only the sheets wrapped around her torso. Chaeyoung regrets panicking, regrets getting out of bed at all as the urge to press up against her makes her fingers itch. Jihyo runs a hand through her hair and Chaeyoung almost fesses up to the lie so that she can have an excuse to press her mouth to the skin of her neck that is revealed with the motion.
“Okay. I’ll see you soon? Text me?”
Chaeyoung blinks and then pulls her head out of the gutter it had fallen into and nods.
“Sure. I’ll see you.”
“I like this a lot,” Suga says. “A little different from your usual sh*t. But it’s got depth. Let’s clean it up and maybe it can go on that album Jihoon keeps asking for.”
The song Chaeyoung had started to prepare when Jihyo had first visited the studio had taken actual shape over time. The lyrics were written in batches always after she left Jihyo’s apartment. They’re not about Jihyo Chaeyoung tells herself, though she should probably acknowledge at some point that she only ever felt inspired on this piece in Jihyo’s presence.
“Okay, what do you think needs work?”
“The bridge is weak. It doesn’t add anything to the song. It either needs to change or it needs to go. The vocal layering in the chorus is bad. The levels are off, and the balance feels weird. It just kills the whole energy. Also the second verse has some funky lyrics. I have no clue what you’re trying to say and if I don’t get it no one else will.”
Suga never measures his words and when they’d first met Chaeyoung had almost punched him over it. But she’d learned that was just how he was and the suggestions that would follow the direct criticism were almost an improvement. And most important, he always made it clear that some smaller issues with her work never changed his opinion of her overall as an artist.
“Okay, I’ll try to fix the second verse then,” she says. “What should we do about the bridge?”
Suga starts rattling off suggestions, fingers flying over the keyboard in front of him as he makes edits. Chaeyoung guides him away from suggestions she hates but nods when he says something she likes.
After a few hours, they order in food and pause to eat because the one rule Suga enforces above all else is that no food should ever approach the set up. It had taken a lot of work to convince him to even let her have her iced coffee nearby, and the rule was that it had to be spilling distance away from the tech.
As they munch on their jjajangmyeon Chaeyoung checks her text messages. Mina reminds her to sleep at a reasonable time because she has an early morning radio interview tomorrow. Jeongyeon is inviting her over to play some video games and then most recently, a text message from Jihyo simply reading what are you up to?
Working, Chaeyoung responds and then waits with bated breath to see if Jihyo will respond.
Ah bummer, I was hoping to see you tonight ;)
She has to duck her head to hide the flush that she knows is spreading across her features from Suga who is too smart and knows her too well to miss it. She wonders if she can find a good excuse to get out of the rest of this session, but she knows that he’ll have a million questions if she tries to leave before a song is finished. She hates breaking up a good flow but for Jihyo…
The thought scares her and she tosses her phone into her backpack without responding. She would leave a producing session for Jihyo? Absolutely not. Her music is the most important thing in the world to her and this song is so, so close to being complete. Just a little more tweaking and it’ll be good. She won’t leave just because there’s a pretty girl offering her a good night.
“All good?” Suga asks, eyeing her curiously.
“Yeah. I’m great. Let’s get back to it.”
Chaeyoung is on the verge of sleep, exhausted from what Jihyo had just done to her with her mouth and then hands and then both. The steady rise and fall of Jihyo’s chest under her is only serving to further relax her. Jihyo’s fingers carding through her hair are the cherry on top. Chaeyoung almost tells Jihyo to stop so that she can garner enough energy to return the favor, but she can’t even find the energy to open her mouth and figures that maybe she’ll just return it at a later date. Maybe in the morning if Jihyo doesn’t have an early schedule.
Her consciousness is only hanging on by a thread when Jihyo speaks.
“Chaeyoung,” she says, voice soft and a little unsure.
The slight tremble in her voice rouses Chaeyoung more than the call of her name and she blinks to clear the sleepiness.
“Hmm?”
“I was wondering if you… I wanted to ask a favor. It’s not anything hard, I don’t think, but it would mean a lot to me.”
The hesitation is so unlike Jihyo that it gives Chaeyoung enough energy to raise her head to look at Jihyo’s face in hopes of getting some information as to her mood. Jihyo is biting her lower lip in a clear show of anxiety and while she’s clearly trying to seem sure of herself, her eyes are darting back and forth.
“Sure,” Chaeyoung says, “Anything.”
A careless promise but Chaeyoung means it. In the back of her mind she’s aware that there’s almost nothing Jihyo could ask her that she would turn down. And since this is the first time Jihyo has asked her for anything other than her time, Chaeyoung doesn’t hesitate.
“I was… I have these lyrics that I wrote. I think I’ve looked at them for too long and I was hoping for a second opinion if you don’t mind. I love the way you write and I just really respect you and your art and-“
“I’d be honored,” Chaeyoung interrupts.
Jihyo looks at Chaeyoung an awestruck glimmer in her eyes. She smiles nervously, and then shuffles out of Chaeyoung’s grip to stand and rifle through her backpack until she pulls out a notebook. It looks much neater, much more well cared for than any of Chaeyoung’s lyric notebooks but it’s clearly well-used in how the pages are thicker with use and the spine has clear creases. Jihyo flips through it until she finds the right page and then gently hands it Chaeyoung who has taken the opportunity to slip a t-shirt on and arrange herself against the headboard. Jihyo kneels on the bed next to her, eyes trained on Chaeyoung’s expression.
At the top of the page it says “Room” in Latin lettering. Chaeyoung traces her finger across the title briefly before she turns her eyes down.
The lyrics remind her of the conversation from months ago when they met for the second time. Screaming into an empty room. They tell a story of escape, bittersweet and hopeful. Warm despite the sadness tinged in them. Firm even in the face of uncertainty.
Chaeyoung feels so goddamn lucky that she gets to see Jihyo like this, gets to read these words straight from the pages, penned with her deft hand. She sees the curls of her letters and imagines the way Jihyo would have painstakingly written them down with all the pressures of her role weighing down on her. Chaeyoung reads them through twice before she notices Jihyo shifting awkwardly next to her.
“They’re beautiful,” Chaeyoung says. “Really. I have no notes.”
“Really?”
Jihyo sounds so, so vulnerable but her eyes are wide and trusting like a child’s. Chaeyoung wonders how many times she’s shared her lyrics before. Wonders if she’s the first person lucky enough to get to see something like this from her.
“Yes,” Chaeyoung says. “Really. They’re so evocative. I feel like I can feel what you’re feeling just by reading them. I just…”
Chaeyoung feels her own words failing. She wants to put into words exactly how much of a mess her stomach had become as she’d absorbed the words off the page. She wants to describe how her heart is racing.
“That feeling of connection,” she says, “You found it here.”
Mina no longer asks where to pick Chaeyoung up from when she texts her asking to be picked up in the mornings. She has Jihyo’s address saved under Home 2 in her work phone and Chaeyoung tries not think about it too much as she slips into the car.
“Where to?” Mina asks. “Home or the studio?”
Chaeyoung contemplates. She really should try to get the EP at least a little closer to being ready but she feels a sort of despair every time she thinks about it. It’s writers block. But it’s worse than it’s been in forever. After finishing up that last song with Suga, she hasn’t been able to write anything else worthwhile. She feels a pressure on her shoulders that tells her that this must be perfect and that anything less than that is simply not worth putting out there. Just thinking about trying to work past that feeling now is making her sick.
“Home,” she says.
Mina nods and pulls away from the curb. The silence between them is comfortable these days. Chaeyoung appreciates that Mina doesn’t ask anything of her past the absolutely necessary. Certainly, she does not ask for small talk or useless pleasantries. It’s comforting in its own way. Except this morning Mina seems to have decided to switch things up.
“Are you getting closer on the EP?”
Chaeyoung sighs. If there’s one question she doesn’t want to answer now it’s this one. Some tracks have been recorded. Enough for an EP but she isn’t happy with the package as a whole. It’s enough for Jihoon, who is overjoyed by the prospect of Chaeyoung having enough tracks ready months before his unofficial deadline of August. But he’s left frustrated because Chaeyoung refuses to actually package them into the EP and release them.
“No.”
For a minute it seems like Chaeyoung’s tone is enough to discourage any further questioning. Mina has gotten good at taking in Chaeyoung’s moods and cataloguing what upsets her. But this time she pushes on.
“Can I… can I ask why? I’ve heard what you have so far. I think… I’m not a music person but I think it’s really good. I liked it a lot. Can I ask what’s holding you back?”
The anger that Chaeyoung is prepared to feel dissipates at the pure curiosity of the question. There’s no urgency behind it. No pressure to produce anything. There’s just Mina, the person not the manager, clearly trying to make an effort to understand her better. Chaeyoung sighs.
“There’s something missing in it. Something important so it feels incomplete right now.”
“And you don’t know what it is?”
Chaeyoung shrugs.
“I feel like the last few times I’ve written albums I’ve known beforehand what the whole album was going to be about. But right now… Jihoon wants one and that’s not really inspiration. I don’t have a story I just have a few songs that don’t fit together quite right.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that how a lot of people write albums these days? Does there always have to be a story?”
“No,” Chaeyoung admits. “But I don’t want to be like that.”
The sentiment hangs heavily in the air between them. For a second Chaeyoung wonders if Mina is thinking about the money they’ll lose if Chaeyoung doesn’t get this album out in a reasonable timeframe.
“Well,” Mina says eventually. “If I can help… let me know.”
She’s grateful for the offer even if she almost certainly will not take Mina up on it.
“So… how as the new album been going?”
Most of the time when Chaeyoung is with Jihyo she feels like a plastic bag in a hurricane, entirely at the whims of the force of nature in front of her. But every so often the roles are switched as Jihyo slips into being a fan of Chaeyoung’s above anything else. She’s not asking about the album now because she cares as a friend. Her tone is different from Jeongyeon’s who asks as if Chaeyoung is coming home from war every time she leaves the studio, and different from Soyeon’s who asks as a fellow artist who has struggled (is currently struggling) with the same frustration. Jihyo is asking as a fan who is desperate to know anything she can learn about the artist she loves. It’s like every so often she remembers that Chaeyoung is someone worthy being star struck over.
“It’s coming,” Chaeyoung answers cautiously.
The writer’s block hasn’t really gotten better. Jihoon texts her daily. Suga is getting frustrated at how she can’t put what she feels is missing into words. Soyeon is telling her to just put it out as is, saying that not everything she does needs to be perfect. And Jihyo… Jihyo asks the least but it’s the heaviest from her because Chaeyoung can’t help but feel like she’s disappointing her when she says there’s been no progress.
“So we can be excited for a release soon?” Jihyo asks, her eyes shining as she crawls across the bed to kneel by Chaeyoung’s side.
“Well, not too soon,” Chaeyoung answers. “There’s still some stuff that needs to come together.”
Jihyo hums as she leans in a little closer and starts to play with the strings of Chaeyoung’s hoodie.
“What kinds of things?”
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel complete yet,” Chaeyoung answers.
Jihyo tilts her head and frowns a little.
“You’re kind of weird,” she says and snickers at Chaeyoung’s taken-aback expression. “You’ll let me watch you work, and you’ll talk to me about your lyrics when it’s rough but whenever I ask you anything about the album or about the music you’re actually planning on releasing, you clam up. Why?”
“The closer I get to releasing a song… the more nervous I get. The more I worry about disappointing.”
“Disappointing me?” Jihyo asks, tilting her head. “Because you won’t. You can’t disappoint me.”
“Yes, I can. I just haven’t yet,” Chaeyoung says. “And it’s not just you. I worry about disappointing my longtime fans. And I don’t want to, but I worry about disappointing the new fans too, the ones that only know my TikTok famous songs and I worry about disappointing myself. When a song is in progress, it’s just a song. It’s like a glorified diary entry. But when it gets released for others to consume… it becomes art and then it’s judged as art.”
Jihyo hums and then leans in to kiss Chaeyoung steady, slow, and consuming. Her hands tug at the strings of Chaeyoung’s hoodie until the hood is scrunched up against Chaeyoung’s neck and she has no choice but to fall into Jihyo.
“It is art,” Jihyo mumbles against her lips. “Everything you make is a masterpiece. Don’t worry too much.”
Chaeyoung has heard these reassurances before from Suga, from Jihoon, from her parents back when she was first getting started. From Mina even. None have ever been as effective as those whispered by Jihyo now, though that must be in part because the way Jihyo licks up into her mouth right after makes it really hard to worry about anything. Chaeyoung pushes Jihyo back to lie on the bed and stares down at her for a second before dipping to kiss her and press her body up against her in a way that’s starting to become too familiar for comfort. She has the thought as she shifts to suck at the junction of Jihyo’s jaw that everyone in the world could hate the EP but if Jihyo likes it, that might be enough.
“When do you leave for the tour again?” Chaeyoung asks absentmindedly as she watches Jihyo futz around her kitchen.
The sex had left Chaeyoung hungry this time and even nearing 3am, she didn’t think she’d be able to sleep without anything in her stomach. When she’d told Jihyo she was going to make some ramen, Jihyo had decided to take over because apparently her way was ‘better’ and ‘life changing’. Chaeyoung doesn’t really care as long as it’s edible, so she lets her.
“In two weeks,” Jihyo says. “We fly out the 15th.”
Chaeyoung nods, trying to ignore the tug in her gut at the thought of not seeing Jihyo for three months. Just three months. Twelve weeks. Really not that long to go without seeing a friend. Except Chaeyoung is gripped by mild panic at the thought and it’s only made worse by the fact that Jihyo doesn’t seem to be affected at all. In fact, she has only looked excited as she’s talked about tour plans and the prospect of international travel.
She won’t miss me, Chaeyoung thinks. Why should I miss her?
There’s a bitterness building in her that she doesn’t know what to do with. It’s too strong for their relationship, two artists who spend half their time together f*cking and the other half arguing over music. While she’s gone, Chaeyoung can argue about music with Soyeon and Suga, and she can have sex with whoever she wants. It’s not like Jihyo is giving her anything indispensable.
The thoughts swirl in her mind as the pot begins to boil and Chaeyoung’s fingers itch to write. Jihyo seems occupied with chopping some vegetables that Chaeyoung didn’t even know she had in her fridge, so Chaeyoung takes the opportunity to grab a notebook and pen.
Writing down her inner turmoil helps release it, helps her feel at least a little removed from it, like she can look at it as an unbiased third party. Chaeyoung doesn’t even know what words are coming out of her until she pauses and reads them back to herself. I want you to miss me. I don’t want to miss you. She fills up a page and then flips to the next. Do you know what you could do to me? Do you even care?
“The ramen is done.”
Jihyo’s voice is at Chaeyoung’s shoulder, and she jumps, shutting her notebook as she does and losing her grip on the pen. It falls to the ground with the soft sound of plastic on hardwood. Jihyo’s expression is surprised and apologetic all at once.
“Sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Were you writing a new song?”
Chaeyoung tries to control her racing heart.
“Just words right now,” she says.
Jihyo’s eyes track down to where the notebook is clutched firmly against Chaeyoung’s chest, and she smiles.
“I hope I get to hear it sometime then,” she says. “Come to the table to eat.”
The ramen is good. Maybe not life changing but the veggies and the eggs and whatever secret extra seasoning Jihyo had added elevate it far past what Chaeyoung was going to make. Jihyo grins when she compliments her, squirming proudly in her seat, and Chaeyoung tires not to think about how cute it is.
When Jihyo falls asleep a half hour later, Chaeyoung tries to slip away with her, but her mind is feeling and thinking too much. She creeps out of the bed and into the living room, retrieving her notebook and pen and she vows to write until her mind is still again. By the time she’s done, sunlight is starting to peek through the curtains.
The DAW seems to be an extension of Chaeyoung’s body today. The words she’d written last week as Jihyo slept in her bed had been rewritten and edited until they were coherent and Chaeyoung felt stripped bare. She likes the vulnerability even if it’s scary. It’s the first step in knowing for certain that her music will touch people.
She starts to put the words to music, and this feels like the easiest song she’s ever written. She doesn’t think as she works, just feels the press of the keys under her fingers and the soft vibrations through her headphones. Suga walks in at some point, but she doesn’t even pause to greet him, and completely loses track of what he’d doing within seconds.
It could have been an hour, two, five… days even but everything works so smoothly that Chaeyoung doesn’t feel like she can stop. She feels like she’s riding a high out as far as it’ll take her and any moves to disrupt it would shatter her entirely. By the time she starts to feel like she’s reaching the end, there's a pinch between her shoulder blades and tightness in her hands that runs from between her first and second knuckles to her wrist and her head is pounding. A rush of blood to her head as she finally stretches makes her see black spots behind her eyes and she has to put her head down for a second to stop the world spinning.
“Are you okay?” Suga asks softly.
She turns slowly to find him sitting on the couch behind their workstation, a book in hand. He’s regarding her carefully, eyes narrowed.
“Yeah,” Chaeyoung says, her voice surprising her with its hoarseness.
“Seems like you got a bolt of inspiration,” he says. “How’s the song?”
“Good,” Chaeyoung says. “Want to hear it?”
“Sure, but you should eat. And drink some water first.”
He offers her a bottle of water and a granola bar and waits patiently as Chaeyoung scarfs them. She nearly chokes in her haste, but a few coughs and a swig of water helps her. Suga just stares at her the whole time with raised eyebrows.
“How long have you been here?”
Chaeyoung glances at the time on her phone and for a second doesn’t believe it. Nearly twelve hours straight. She realizes suddenly that she really, really has to pee.
“A while.”
Suga looks at her quizzically but doesn’t bother questioning further.
“Can I hear it?”
“Sure.”
She hands him a headset and puts her own over her ears and hits play. She watches Suga’s expression carefully. When it’s over he slides the headphones off and puts them on the bench thoughtfully.
“This is really, really good Chaeyoung,” he says. “A love song though. That’s… different.”
“It’s not a love song,” she says defensively.
“Okay,” Suga says slowly.
Chaeyoung doesn’t like the way he’s looking at her, so she decides the best (only) course of action is to turn her attention back to her DAW.
“You should take a break,” Suga says, plucking her headphones off her desk and holding them out of reach before she can put them on. “You’ve been here for too long. Go home. Sleep. Come back tomorrow.”
Chaeyoung hates disrupting her creative process, but Suga’s expression is firm and as she tries to stare him down, she’s reminded that she still really has to pee and maybe a break is more than warranted.
“Fine.”
With Jihyo gone, Chaeyoung suddenly finds herself with a lot more free time than she knows what to do with. The writing is coming along but she can’t force it, can’t use those free hours to just… make words appear on a page or chords flow well. The hole Jihyo leaves is… just that, a hole. There’s nothing that can take its place, no matter how hard Chaeyoung tries.
She hates feeling dependent on Jihyo, especially when the other woman is probably too busy to feel the same. Jihyo had sent her pictures of the first night of the tour, grinning with her arms around her members, laughter clear in her expression. She seemed perfectly alright. Chaeyoung didn’t bother answering. What could she say anyway? I miss you felt far, far to needy.
She finds herself on Jeongyeon’s couch, splitting a bottle of soju, with a controller in her hand and her vape in the other. Jeongyeon is pretty serious about video games while Chaeyoung can only barely remember which buttons do what, but they play casually together. Jeongyeon has after many years managed to just go with the flow of Chaeyoung’s inevitable losses in the game. Tonight she’s worse than usual. There’s a restlessness under her skin that she’s been trying desperately to get rid of. The nicotine has not been doing its job. Neither has the alcohol.
The thing is that Chaeyoung knows that there is a way to get rid of the feeling. All she would have to do is answer the unanswered messages from Jihyo on her phone. They’ve been haunting her. The newest one is five days old and Chaeyoung thinks that there probably won’t be another one unless she answers. The first few had come in quick succession - small updates on Jihyo’s tour and a question asking how Chaeyoung was doing. The messages themselves weren’t scary. No, it was the way Chaeyoung’s heart would suddenly come to life when she got a notification. It was the way her fingers itched to answer, a craving like an addiction. It's the fact that, now that Jihyo has maybe given up due to her unresponsiveness, Chaeyoung feels a cold dread spread through her bones.
This dependence on another person is something Chaeyoung can’t remember ever experiencing and she hates it. People are fundamentally selfish and while she can surround herself with people whose company she enjoys, to put her happiness in someone else’s hands like this is terrifying. She needs this aching yearning to go away. She needs to know that she can be okay without Jihyo, so she leaves the messages unanswered.
She’s startled out of her thoughts by the sharp sound of snapping and Jeongyeon’s fingers in front of her face.
“Where is your head at right now?” Jeongyeon asks. “I called your name like five times, and you haven’t moved at all since the level started. Did you smoke too much?”
Chaeyoung looks at her character’s idle animation on the screen. She hadn’t even realized the level had loaded and started.
“Sorry, got distracted.”
“Yeah, I figured. I’m asking by what,” Jeongyeon asks. “You’ve been on another planet all night. Is the album not going well?”
That hadn’t been what Chaeyoung was thinking about. At least not directly. But it’s been on her mind recently… She’s observant enough to recognize that the last worthwhile thing she wrote was in Jihyo’s presence. Ever since she left, nothing has flowed. She tries not to consider the implications.
“Not really,” she says. “Just writer's block. I’ll get past it.”
“Is that why you’ve been coming over so much? Cause you’re stuck?”
Chaeyoung shrugs. Really, the reason she’d come over more was to try to fill the hole Jihyo had left. But well… the album is a good enough excuse.
“Well, if you’re going to be here, at least focus on the game and get your head off writing. It’ll be better for both of us that way. Mostly for me.”
Chaeyoung rolls her eyes and punches Jeongyeon in the shoulder before gripping the controller more firmly and turning her focus to the screen. If she can’t text Jihyo or write, she may as well try to get a high score on this game. She should make something of her time.
You’ve been checking your phone continuously since we got here.
Mina’s annoyance is clear even through the screen. Chaeyoung can imagine it in her tone, the one with a slight edge that she always takes when reprimanding her.
If there are too many photos of you on your phone online later, it’ll look really bad.
You were invited here and are in the front row. Try to look interested.
Chaeyoung fights the urge to roll her eyes, but she grows conscious of the number of cameras in the room and slips her phone into her purse and turning back to face the runway.
Chaeyoung does her best to focus on the show in front of her. Her recent collaboration with Coach had gotten her a good seat but, if she’s being honest, she’s never understood this kind of high fashion. She likes clothes, makes an effort to style herself when she’s out in public or on stage, and she finds herself watching people on the street sometimes if they’re dressed in a way she finds particularly interesting. But this stuff… some of it barely looks like clothes. She appreciates that it is meant to be art more than anything, but she feels a little out of her depth as far as knowing what is supposed to be ‘good’ or not.
That, unfortunately, makes this show a little boring and it doesn’t give her much to distract herself from her swirling thoughts about Jihyo and her obnoxiously silent phone. More than anything, she hates how desperate she feels, like there’s an itch inside her that only Jihyo can scratch. She had hoped that with time and distance, that feeling would subside but every day without another text from Jihyo makes it slightly harder to breathe.
She could probably solve the problem by texting back, but she has too much pride to admit to herself that she let her feelings get completely tied up in someone that she wasn’t even dating. None of her exes had gotten even close to having this much influence over her. The lack of control over her own emotions is disconcerting to say the least.
As soon as the show is over, Chaeyoung is on her feet. The antsyness from before is on its way to turning into full-blown anxiety and she wants to get out of here and breathe for a little before the afterparty starts. She makes her way over to Mina where the rest of the staff are seated but on her way collides with someone.
“Sorry, sorry!” she says in English instinctively, knowing that would be the common language of most people here.
But when she looks up, she finds herself eye to eye with a semi-familiar face.
“It’s okay,” the woman answers in smooth Korean.
Kim Dahyun smiles at Chaeyoung and gives her a bow of greeting that Chaeyoung returns instinctively.
“Son Chaeyoung-ssi, right?” Dahyun says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“You too, Kim Dahyun-ssi,” Chaeyoung answers.
Dahyun is an actress, and according to the lanyard around her manager’s neck, also a Michael Kors brand ambassador. Chaeyoung had watched one of her dramas last year with Jeongyeon and while the overly cheesy romance wasn’t really her preferred genre, she had enjoyed watching Dahyun who was a good actress and also very pretty.
“I’ve been a fan of your music,” Dahyun says. “I haven’t listened to all of it, but I have a few songs on my workout playlist.”
Chaeyoung does her best not to cringe and just nods and gives a polite ‘thank you’. She’s grateful for Mina’s appearance at her shoulder, so that she doesn’t have to try to think of a follow up.
“We should get dinner before the after party,” Mina says softly, politely, bowing to both Dahyun and her manager.
“It seems I have to go,” Chaeyoung says.
“Well,” Dahyun says, “We were also going to grab dinner now. There’s a really lovely place only a couple of blocks from here that serves really good Korean food. Would you like to join?”
Mina is agreeing before Chaeyoung can answer, probably with thoughts dancing through her head about making a good connection with an established figure in the entertainment industry. Chaeyoung would really rather just order room service and maybe sneak in a nap but… well… she takes a peek at her phone and there’s still nothing there. Maybe a distraction would do her good.
Mina and Dahyun’s manager drop them off at the after party with a promise to come get them when they’re ready to leave and, from Mina, a whispered ‘please behave’. Chaeyoung follows Dahyun into the rented out club and is immediately put at ease by the music, which is exactly her taste, and the promise of alcohol.
She starts off the night sticking to Dahyun’s side. She had been pleasant at dinner, kind and funny, with none of the snobbish attitudes that many celebrities of her caliber might have. That, along with their shared language, makes her someone comfortable to be around. But then Chaeyoung runs into an American rapper that she likes a lot, and she musters her courage and all of her meager English vocabulary to talk to him for a bit. He’s patient with her attempts to converse despite the slight struggle to understand each other. He even takes a picture with her.
He introduces her to a producer friend of his and they manage to talk a little bit with hand gestures and the help of a translator app and Chaeyoung ends up with a new phone number in her phone. She finds herself getting passed off to another American artist she likes, one who, despite all odds seems to know her as well, at least a little. Chaeyoung can’t really determine the extent of her knowledge but she’s just proud that her music seems to have made it out of Korea.
There are a few other musicians and producers that she ends up talking to, drinking with, but eventually, she finds herself back at Dahyun’s side. She’s feeling a lot looser and a lot drunker now and she grins at her.
“You’ve been really making the rounds,” Dahyun says, a soft smile on her face. “I’m impressed. I managed to talk to like… three people before I gave up. It’s exhausting.”
“Yeah,” Chaeyoung says. “But look!”
She pulls out her phone, doing her best to ignore the lack of notifications, and shows Dahyun the pictures she has with some very famous people.
“I also got a few numbers and two requests to collab!”
Dahyun smiles at her.
“You deserve it. You’re representing the best of Korea.”
“Pshhh, I don’t know about the best but… thank you.”
Dahyun laughs.
“Your music is good, your persona is well-liked, and your performances are electric. You deserve this.”
Chaeyoung feels warmed by the alcohol and the compliment and for the first time in days doesn’t think about her phone in her purse as she offers to buy Dahyun a drink.
“Jihoon keeps texting me to ask if you’ve been writing,” Mina says as she settles into her seat next to Chaeyoung on the plane.
Chaeyoung was about to put her noise cancelling headphones on and block out the world for the rest of the twelve hour flight. She sighs because it seems like Mina wants to use this time to debrief. Well, Chaeyoung supposes she’d prefer doing it now rather than in the middle of the flight, so she rests her headphones on her lap and gives Mina her attention.
“And what did you tell him?”
“That it was really busy and hectic here and you didn’t have time,” Mina answers.
So she’d lied. Chaeyoung appreciates it. It’s true that she hadn’t written a word, but it hadn’t been because she was too busy. She had tried, had even bought a new notebook at a cute little stationary shop she’d found with Dahyun the afternoon after the show when they'd gone shopping together. But despite the fresh smell of the notebook and her favorite pen in hand, the page had remained blank. She’d gotten so frustrated that she hadn’t bothered even opening the book again.
“Thank you,” Chaeyoung says softly.
“Also, pictures of you and Dahyun shopping were leaked. You should really be careful with your public image when you’re out like that. I know we were in Paris, and you probably didn’t think you had to worry about it but now we’re going to have to do damage control.”
“Damage control? Why? Is it bad that I was out with her?”
Mina sighs and reaches into her bag to pull out her iPad and quickly pulls up some images.
“These are the photos.”
The first two seem fine but as Mina continues swiping she understands the concern. There’s one in a jewelry shop where Chaeyoung had leaned over the counter to get a better look at a ring she was interested in. Dahyun stands behind her close enough for their shoulders to touch and her hand on Chaeyoung’s lower back for balance as she also craned her neck for a better look. The hand placement seems intimate even to Chaeyoung, who at the time hadn’t thought anything of it. There’s another photo at a market a few blocks away that they had walked to whit their heads are bent closely together as they speak. Chaeyoung vaguely remembers that they were discussing whether to get two crepes or just share one. But she doesn’t remember being that close, noses apparently almost touching, and has to wonder if it’s an illusion of the camera angle. The next photo is of them sharing the single crepe they had eventually decided on, Dahyun feeding Chaeyoung a bite and laughing as Chaeyoung had struggled to not spill the powdered sugar down her front.
“Ugh, it wasn’t like that,” Chaeyoung whines. “We were just being friendly.”
“And I’m happy about that but… well, there have been rumors about you since you came on the scene, and these are just adding fuel to the fire.”
“What kind of rumors?”
Mina sighs.
“You should really check your social media more. They’re saying that you’re gay. You haven’t shown much interest in men, and the tattoo’s and cool girl aura give off a certain vibe.”
Chaeyoung feels her blood run cold. She had always thought that she had managed to keep her sexuality a complete secret from the public. Though she values authenticity more than anything, she does have a self-preservation instinct that knows full well that South Korea is not ready for her to come out. And it had never really bothered her. After all, her sexuality was her business and never influenced her music that much, so she was always very happy to keep it private. Whenever writing about a partner in her music, she had taken full advantage of the ambiguity of the Korean language to avoid mentioning a gender either way. So despite these rumors being true… she’s terrified of what it could mean for her career.
“They’re just fringe rumors,” Mina is quick to reassure. “They don’t pose a risk to your career but pictures like these only add fuel to the fire. I just ask that you be a little more aware of your surroundings when you’re in public with someone: male or female. I’ve already had to clean up one of your messes like this once before and it’s not fun.”
“You’ve done this before?” Chaeyoung asks. “For me?”
“Yeah,” Mina says, taking her iPad back from Chaeyoung and closing out the pictures. “Some scumbag parked outside of Jihyo’s apartment caught you two going in together once and you coming out alone the next morning in the same clothes.”
The dread that had already started to make her nauseous seems to settle even deeper, taking on an edge similar to panic.
“When was this? What… what do we do?
Mina looks at her and at her panicked expression and takes her hand, squeezing it soothingly.
“Hey, it’s okay. It was a month or so ago and it’s been handled. They didn’t publish the pictures, just told us that they had them and they would publish them if we didn’t pay them. We met up with a representative from JYPE, paid off everyone involved, and made them all sign pretty air-tight NDA’s. They were clearly just trying to get money and the JYPE folks had clearly dealt with issues like this before. They said they had a few other tactics to make sure it didn’t become a problem. We’ve been keeping an eye out, but it seems that whatever they did has worked. The photos never saw the light of day.”
Chaeyoung tries to calm herself. She trusts Mina almost implicitly these days. While their personalities may be at odds sometimes… Mina is good at her job. Very, very good. And if she says not to worry, then Chaeyoung has to believe that she knows what’s best. Still, it takes a while for the anxiety to disperse.
Another song starts to take shape slowly after her return from Paris fashion week. She’s not sure if it’ll make it on the album necessarily but her conversation with Mina had left her with feelings that needed processing, so she’d written. It’s an okay start, could be good enough with some tweaking but it’s still not the song that the album needs.
Chaeyoung has tried talking to Suga, Jeongyeon too, and Soyeon, but none of their suggestions have been helpful. Suga insists that she just needs to sit down and write, and it’ll come to her. Jeongyeon swears that every song on the album is already good enough to be that center song. Soyeon is going through her own bout of writer’s block and ends up commiserating rather than helping.
Chaeyoung finds herself calling Dahyun to see if she wants to hang out. She’s very careful about the location she picks, makes sure it’s private, and assures Dahyun that she doesn’t have to come out if she feels uncomfortable, but Dahyun brushes her off easily and tells her happily that she’ll meet her.
Dahyun plays piano. Really well, actually, but she hasn’t ever written a song in her life and the classical music she was trained on is strides from the style of music Chaeyoung is composing. Yet, where Dahyun lacks in helpfulness, she makes up for in being just a good listener.
“Is there a story to the album?” she asks.
“Not really a story so much as… well…. I guess it’s kind of a story. It’s more of a diary really, but it’s missing a climax, the song that gives context to all the other songs.”
“What are the other songs about? The ones you’ve written so far?”
Chaeyoung thinks about it.
“Just my feelings,” she says, broadly.
Dahyun raises her eyebrows but doesn’t comment on the vagueness of the statement, nor does she pry. Chaeyoung likes that about her.
“But the feelings you’ve written so far, they aren’t enough?”
“They aren’t complete. They’re all half-formed. Which is fine, not everything needs to be a fully realized thought, but I need a song where the emotions are clear to anchor it all together.”
Dahyun nods her head a hums like she understands though it’s clear she doesn’t really. But she’s supportive, which is nice. She’s been a pleasant addition in Chaeyoung’s life. Though they had avoided meeting too much, they had texted a good amount. It wasn’t like Chaeyoung to make these kinds of friends: sweet, soft, no dark underside. Jeongyeon had approvingly stated that Dahyun had somehow managed to cut through all of Chaeyoung’s cynicism.
“Maybe the problem is that your emotions aren’t clear to yourself,” Dahyun says thoughtfully. “Is there a common thread in the other songs you’ve written so far?”
Chaeyoung stares at the tea in front of her, swirling it thoughtfully with her spoon.
“Not really,” she says. “It’s just a collection of stuff I’ve written over the last few months. I think I was feeling something different each time. I don’t know. I haven’t been approaching this album the way I normally do. I just wrote what I was feeling in the moment instead of having an inspiration for the whole album. It’s not how I prefer to do it, but my CEO was pressuring me.”
“Well maybe there’s a thread anyway. Like something that connects all of them,” Dahyun says. “Can I listen?”
Chaeyoung is surprised at the request. She’s learned pretty quickly that Dahyun is not a fan of her type of music. She’s listened to a few of the songs that got popular on the radio but never sought any of them out. Dahyun had told her plainly that she doesn’t really understand hip-hop that well, that she was raised on ballads and classical music and that’s what makes sense to her.
“I promise I won’t leak the tracks,” Dahyun says, misinterpreting Chaeyoung’s expression. “I just thought maybe an outside perspective would help.”
Chaeyoung thinks that she’s had more than enough outside perspectives with Suga, Soyeon, Jeongyeon, Jihoon, Mina, and a few of the company’s producers having listened to the tracks already. But Dahyun looks so hopeful and like she really, really wants to help. Chaeyoung figures that it won’t hurt and pulls up the demos on her phone.
Dahyun listens to them while Chaeyoung, looking for literally anything to do, orders them two more drinks and some more pastries. She’s not really hungry but watching Dahyun’s face flash through numerous unidentifiable expressions as she digests Chaeyoung’s music makes her feel weird. Finally, just as their new drinks and food arrive, Dahyun pulls out her headphones and hands the phone back to her.
“Who is ‘Murmurs’ about?” Dahyun asks.
Chaeyoung nearly spits out her tea.
“Uhhh,” she says as she tries to collect herself. “It’s not really about anyone specific…”
Dahyun raises her eyebrows. Chaeyoung thinks that Dahyun is selling herself short. She understands hip hop well enough to have picked out that song… the one that she wrote in Jihyo’s apartment just before she’d left for her tour while the other woman slept and Chaeyoung could still feel the mirage of her fingers and lips on her skin. Chaeyoung has been telling herself that it isn’t about Jihyo, just inspired by her, but as Dahyun looks at her critically, she realizes the distinction might be meaningless.
“Really? I don’t know much about your old music, but I didn’t think you wrote love songs that much. But half the songs here are love songs. Are they really not about anyone?”
“I wasn’t in love with her,” Chaeyoung denies quickly. “She was just someone I knew.”
“So ‘Murmurs’ is about this mystery girl?”
“It’s… she’s just… inspiration…”
Dahyun smiles at her softly and picks up her drink, taking a long drink before placing it gently on the table.
“I have a feeling you’re going to punch me for what I’m about to say,” Dahyun says, cautiously. “And maybe I don’t know you well enough to be this forward... but in my professional opinion the reason you’re stalled out is because you aren’t letting yourself feel your emotions properly. I think you feel more for this person, whoever they are, than you’re willing to admit.”
Dahyun’s instincts are on point. Chaeyoung does kind of feel like punching her. Not because she’s wrong, and not even because she’s being very forward, but instead because Dahyun has clearly figured her out. And in doing so, she laid bare every emotion that Chaeyoung was trying to bury deep, deep down and not examine too closely. Chaeyoung feels uncomfortably picked apart, as if Dahyun had told her to strip down to her underwear.
Luckily, Dahyun doesn’t push past that and takes Chaeyoung’s silence as an indicator to change topics. She talks about her upcoming movie and Chaeyoung does her best to listen even as her feelings swirl uncomfortably in her chest. Her mind is on her songs and on Jihyo and she starts to realize that really they’re one and the same. Her music, every word, every chord, every beat has been shaped around this woman consciously or subconsciously. As she thinks, she realizes that Dahyun is right… the thread is there, connecting all the songs. Even the ones not about love were about Jihyo.
Afterwards, as Chaeyoung lays in her bed, the entire room lit only by the glow of her phone screen, Chaeyoung finally starts to type.
I’m sorry for not responding sooner. I hope the tour is going well.
I miss you.
The feeling is icky, gross, and cold. A shaky crawling starting in her chest and seeping out until her whole body feels like it’s made of static. She’s nauseous and lightheaded.
JYPE confirms that Park Jihyo and Kang Daniel have been dating for the last six months
The headline feels like a punch in the gut and slap in the face at the same time. Jihyo and Daniel’s press pictures are plastered on the front page, Kang Daniel at some award show with his stupidly charming smile that had girls falling for him left and right. Jihyo on a red carpet, dressed to the nines. She barely looks like the Jihyo Chaeyoung knows, but maybe Chaeyoung never really knew her.
Six months the article says. Chaeyoung had been in Jihyo’s bed six weeks ago, had found inspiration in her touch, in her smile. She wants to grab her last notebook of lyrics and tear it to shreds, erasing every word she had ever written with Jihyo’s eyes in her mind. She wants to scream. She wants to throw her guitar out the window and never write anything again.
She does none of these things and instead just lets her hand fall limp, her phone slipping from her grasp and onto the floor. She feels sick. She really might throw up. There’s bile in her throat and her stomach roils uncomfortably. She lies back on her bed and stares at the ceiling. Had Jihyo really been seeing him the entire time they’d known each other? Chaeyoung doesn’t want to believe it. But it says as much in big, bold letters. It had even been confirmed by her company. There’s nothing to disbelieve.
The first sob she lets out catches her by surprise, but all the subsequent ones don’t. She rolls onto her side and curls up, pressing her hands, balled into fists against her chest in hopes of soothing the pulsing ache that threatens take the breath from her lungs.
The doorbell rings three times before Mina gives up and uses Chaeyoung’s home code and lets herself in. She always said that she would never use it unless it was an emergency, that she respected Chaeyoung’s space and privacy, and, to Chaeyoung’s knowledge, she never had before. But after the ignored phone calls, and texts, after the missed meeting, and the ignored doorbell, she must have felt justified.
She lets herself into Chaeyoung’s room and immediately makes a sound of disapproval. Though Chaeyoung’s back is to her, she can imagine perfectly the expression she’s making. It’s almost comforting, the constancy and predictability of her disappointment in her.
“This room is a pigsty,” Mina says, but the reprimand is missing an edge.
It’s softer and more cautious and Chaeyoung, after some consideration, labels Mina’s tone as pity.
“You missed the meeting with Jihoon. He’s not happy, but I told him that you had a new song and he let it go. You… you’re still planning on putting that song on the album, right?”
Chaeyoung considers the question and then considers telling Mina to go f*ck herself. She’s too tired to do that but if she had just a little bit more energy she might tell her that the last thing she wants to do is think about that stupid song. The song she’d started writing with crooning lyrics about missing someone who was oceans away. f*ck. Even thinking about it makes her feel like an idiot. She won’t finish the song. The notebook it’s written in probably won’t ever get opened again.
“Okay, I understand that you aren’t really doing well right now… I’m sorry about what happened with-“
The desire to never hear Jihyo’s name again, gives Chaeyoung the energy to roll over and Mina. Her manager cuts off.
“Sorry,” Mina mumbles. “Would you… shall I cancel your meetings and stuff for the next few days? I can tell them you’re sick and we can reschedule. Does that sound okay?”
The offer is surprising, especially coming from Mina who Chaeyoung had always thought was too much of a stickler for anyone’s good. Part of her, the part that feels pathetic and weak, wants to say no. It wants to stand up right now and show Mina that she’s fine because there’s no way in hell she’s like this because of some girl. But when she actually tries moving, she finds that her muscles aren’t listening to her brain properly and she just sighs and nods.
“Okay, I’ll start working on that,” Mina says softly. “In exchange, can you do something for me?”
Chaeyoung fears what Mina will ask, already sure that it’s going to be too much, that she’s going to have to explain that she’s too broken, completely unraveled by someone that never made her any promises.
“Can you please take a shower? And eat some food? I’m not sure you’ve done either in the last few days.”
That request shouldn’t feel like too much. A shower would probably be good if Chaeyoung could move but she’s having trouble even lifting her head. The exhaustion of crying herself to sleep the last few nights and probably the lack of food too, and the pure existential apathy all work together in pouring lead into her bones, making her limbs feel impossibly heavy. Mina seems to pick up on her struggle and carefully, slowly walks over to the bed, placing her purse on the night stand and guiding Chaeyoung to sitting.
“Let me help you,” she says softly. “It’ll be better soon.”
It’s embarrassing as a full grown woman to let someone else undress her to her underwear and guide her to the bathroom with a firm hand at her lower back, but Mina does it with no fuss. Her business-like manner serves wonderfully to make Chaeyoung feel like this is somehow an expected part of her job.
“Shower,” Mina says as she slowly closes the bathroom door. “I’ll make you food and then you can go back to bed if you want.”
Chaeyoung is torn between embarrassment and gratitude and just finds herself staring at Mina. Mina smiles at her and then fully closes the door, leaving Chaeyoung standing in her underwear. It takes some focus and a lot of staring listlessly at the wall, but Chaeyoung is able to finish undressing and step into the shower. She manages shampoo before she gets too tired to go on and skips the other two steps of her usual hair care routine and all of the steps of her skin care routine, but she feels cleaner and fresher when she steps out.
When she re-enters her room, it’s been thoroughly cleaned and at the foot of the bed are a clean sweatshirt and sweatpants that Chaeyoung slips on without bothering to dry off properly, letting her towel drop to the floor. Her bed calls to her, but she knows that Mina will come in to drag her out if she lies back down. She cautiously makes her way out of her room to find Mina sitting at her dining room table on her phone with a steaming bowl of ramen at the seat across from her, an egg and some sparce vegetables sprucing up the instant meal.
“I’ll go grocery shopping for you tomorrow,” Mina says. “I have a feeling that your current state isn’t the reason for your lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. You really need to eat healthier. I made do with what I have but you shouldn’t rely on instant ramen this much.”
Chaeyoung doesn’t bother answering, and just takes her seat. As soon as she smells the food, her stomach, which hadn’t felt much more than a sinking, sick feeling the last few days, grumbles loudly. She cautiously takes a bite and is hit by how hungry she is and starts shoveling the food into her mouth.
“Slow down,” Mina says. “You’re going to make yourself throw up. And the food isn’t going anywhere. Did you even bother drying your hair at all? Your shirt is soaking.”
Mina stands and Chaeyoung can distantly hear her fumbling around in her bathroom. Mina returns with a towel, a blow-dryer, and a brush in hand and, as Chaeyoung eats (more slowly now), she carefully brushes out and dries Chaeyoung’s hair. By the time she’s done, Chaeyoung feels nearly a hundred times better.
“Go brush your teeth and you can get back in bed,” Mina says. “I’ll come by again tomorrow okay? Make sure to drink water.”
Chaeyoung follows Mina’s gentle instructions and brushes her teeth, even managing to wash her face, before she crawls back into her bed, which she notices has a new set of sheets.
“I… I hope you feel better, Chaeyoung,” Mina says. “I- I’m sorry for… I didn’t know that she… what I’m trying to say is that you didn’t deserve it. Okay? You deserve better.”
Chaeyoung doesn’t know what to say to that, but she supposes it doesn’t matter. Mina closes the door behind her and a few seconds later, Chaeyoung hears her front door close. She closes her eyes, hoping that sleep will take her but after fifteen minutes of trying she realizes that it’s futile. Her head is too full, the thoughts too chaotic and dark to parse out, constantly overlapping and cutting each other off. It’s a cacophony of nothingness and like the last few days it makes her feel like she’s drowning. But maybe it’s the new clothes or the clean hair or the soft sheets but instead of crying the feelings out, Chaeyoung feels the urge to grab a notebook.
Sluggishly, she manages to get out of bed again and grabs a fresh notebook, one given as a gift by a fan that doesn’t have anything written for Jihyo or anyone else yet and sits at her desk and starts to write.
Suga doesn’t say anything as Chaeyoung wanders into the studio after having been noticeably absent for two weeks. He just regards her curiously as she takes her seat and pulls out her notebook. At first, the words she’d scrawled into the book had been a jumbled mess but after many days of scratching out, re-writing, deciding she hated music and lyrics and then remembering that no, she didn’t, she had the words to three new songs laid out in front of her. This is how she processes. This is how she takes the cacophony and turns it into something she can understand, something she can giving meaning to.
But the words aren’t enough. They don’t do enough to get out the raging, burning anger in her gut. Nor the sluggish deep depression. Nor the confusion, hurt, self-loathing, or pain. For that she needs music. She needs the beats to sync with her shattered heart beats, she needs to be able to spit lines that hold every inch of the venom she feels, she needs to know that others will not just understand her pain but feel it when they listen.
She sits at her DAW and it feels almost foreign under her fingertips. Two weeks really is too long to be away. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, anticipating the release that will come from this. It’ll take days, weeks maybe, for Chaeyoung to get through it but she knows at the end, there will be some relief.
“I suppose I should be happy that you traded your bed for the recording studio,” Mina says wryly. “But you need to sleep. Shower. Eat. Drink something other than coffee. Suga texted me. Said that he thinks you’ve been here the last two days.”
Chaeyoung doesn’t look up from her computer, but she does give Mina a half-wave of greeting. Mina lets out an amused huff and takes a seat on the couch behind her.
“I brought food. For whenever you can take a break. Kimchi fried rice from that place you like.”
A hum of acknowledgement is all Chaeyoung can manage. She can’t look away from the screen. Mina is right. She had traded her bed for her DAW. It’s not healthier though. She’s pretty sure it’s worse. At least when she was in her bed, she had slept. Here she’s plagued by the same thoughts, angry, dark, bitter, and they’re coming out as music. She’s making songs. Songs that are rawer than anything she’s done before, songs that threaten to rip open the heart of whoever hears them. But it’s not bringing her any closer to the relief she’s chasing.
As she pours her heart out, she doesn’t feel like it’s getting lighter. Instead, she’s starting to wonder if it’s just a bottomless pit of nothingness. There might not be an end, she considers hopelessly. Maybe she’ll just continue to feel like this forever. The thought makes her hands still over her DAW and then slip into her lap.
“Chaeyoung?” Mina asks, noticing her change in demeanor. “Are you okay?”
Chaeyoung doesn’t answer but she doesn’t need to. Mina is getting very good at reading her and can probably tell that Chaeyoung’s dark cloud is bordering on hurricane levels of dangerous. Maybe she already knows what’s making Chaeyoung’s hands shake. Maybe she’d also seen the news that morning that Twice had returned to Korea. Their tour was over. Jihyo was back. It had Chaeyoung feeling pathetically on high alert. Now that they were in the same country again, would they run into each other on the street or at some event? Would Jihyo try contacting her again?
The hope that Chaeyoung feels at the possibility feels like an insult to her intelligence and to her self-preservation instincts. It makes her angry. She wants to slam her hands down on her DAW and destroy it. It feels almost like it’s betraying her by not being able to convey the weight of her heartbreak.
“Why don’t you take a break?” Mina pleads. “I’ll drive you home and make you food and you can pick up again after you’ve slept.”
Chaeyoung stares at the screen in front of her. Her vision swims. She’s suddenly she can feel how her head is pounding, likely due to the combined effects of exhaustion, dehydration, and hunger. She puts her head in her hands and groans.
“Come on,” Mina says softly, her hands suddenly firm against Chaeyoung’s shoulders. “I’ll take you home.”
Chaeyoung allows herself to be guided out of the chair and through the halls of the company, with Mina’s hand firm but gentle against her lower back. The fluorescents of the hallway make her head hurt, but the low light of the parking garage is better, and the backseat with the darkened windows is even better. Mina slips into the driver’s seat and hands her a water bottle.
“Drink this,” she says.
Chaeyoung, despite not being able to pinpoint the last time she consumed anything hydrating, doesn’t really feel like drinking but under Mina’s watchful gaze she forces sips down her throat. She feels like a child again. She had never been a big eater and would much rather run around or draw or dance to the radio than sit still and have a meal. Her mother used to put food in front of her and watch her consume each bite, praising her when she finished and scolding her when she inevitably tried to escape the table early. Mina’s expression is disturbingly similar.
“Do you think I’m pathetic?”
Mina blinks slowly in surprise, opening her mouth and then closing it again as she considers her next words carefully.
“No,” she says neutrally. “Why do you think that?”
Chaeyoung looks down at the still two-thirds full water bottle.
“I feel pathetic,” she says. “We never even… it was just casual. I shouldn’t… I completely fell apart over something that didn’t even mean that much. It feels pathetic.”
“It’s not. You put your trust in the wrong person… but that doesn’t make you pathetic,” Mina says. “It just makes you a good person who got taken advantage of.”
Tears well in Chaeyoung’s eyes and her throat feels too thick to answer so she just ducks her head and nods.
The album is done.
After months of work, she had finally put together a story that felt worth telling. A story of a love that turns sour, of a girl who is softened by someone wonderful only to end up shattered. It had been a long internal battle on whether to keep the songs written before she’d known who Jihyo would turn out to be, but in the end they were part of the story too. And Chaeyoung didn’t want them anymore. She wanted to hand those feelings away too. She would give them to the public so that it could be their responsibility and not hers. If they stayed in her drafts, they would only haunt her more.
Suga and a few of the other producers listen to it and give comments here and there but they are all excited for what she’s made. One of the older producers puts his hand on her shoulder and tells her that she’s not just some rookie anymore and it makes her glow with pride. She wonders if he knows exactly how meaningful that compliment is.
She sends it to Jihoon after they’ve all given their approval.
“I listened to the album yesterday. It’s really, really good. I have, for once, no comments at all. Just one question,” Jihoon pauses uncertainly and clears his throat. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Chaeyoung says.
As much as she likes Jihoon as a boss, she’s never really considered him a friend. Past her music, he doesn’t get to know what’s going on inside her head. Luckily he doesn’t press.
“Well, this album is darker than what I expected but it’ll be perfect for a mid-fall release. I’d say October. We might even be able to get some nominations at award shows with that timing and you can perform at the end of the year shows. That means we have about two months to film the music video and plan promotions. Let’s set up a meeting with the management team and get everything hammered out. You’re going to promote ‘Dreamless’ as the main track right?”
Chaeyoung nods. The completion of that song had finally, finally after weeks brought about some of the relief that she had been looking for. Musically it’s also the best track, the one that manages to pull the whole album to the climax that it needs.
“Okay, I think that’s a good choice. It’s got a good balance and I think will perform well on the charts. I know that’s not what you care about,” he’s quick to interject as he sees Chaeyoung’s expression shift. “But it’s important. We’ll start preparations tomorrow.”
Mina looks exhausted. Chaeyoung feels it as well. The days leading up to the album release have been long and they’re only going to get longer after it’s out and the promotional train picks up. They’ve both already been fighting the pressures of burnout since the back-to-back night-long music video shoots. Since then, Chaeyoung has been shooting promotional material in nearly every free moment.
The last couple albums she released weren’t hectic like this but with the boom in her popularity came a wealth of invitations for interviews, guest spots on variety shows, photoshoots, magazine covers, and YouTube collaborations. She wakes up every day having to go to some new location to film something and spending as much of her free time as she reasonably can practicing and preparing for the showcase that will happen on the night of the release.
Mina has started sleeping in Chaeyoung’s guest room to save time on the twenty minute rides to and from her house every time she needs to drive Chaeyoung somewhere new. After the music video shoot, she had entirely given up on giving Chaeyoung a homemade meal every day and just made sure that what they ordered at least had vegetables in it.
Chaeyoung is so grateful for her these days that she almost can’t imagine having disliked her in the first place. Which is good because Chaeyoung desperately feels like she needs someone in her corner as the date of the release approaches.
She’s never been this nervous for an album release before. Just thinking about it threatens to devolve into a panic attack which is terrible because she really can’t deal with the consequences of a panic attack right now, but she also doesn’t have the option to not think about it when it fills her entire day. Jihoon and Suga think her nerves stem from her increased visibility. Jihoon thinks she’s getting stage fright for the first time in her career. Suga thinks that she’s worrying too much about impressing her newer fans. Chaeyoung could care less about that sh*t. This music is for her. Arguably for her older fans too, the ones that have stuck it out since the beginning. But every time she thinks of them… she thinks of Jihyo.
She hates that there’s still warmth in her chest when she remembers the way Jihyo had lit up when they’d first met. The crackle of connection she’d felt when they’d talked about her music. That feeling of being understood. She still craves that feeling, still wants it even though she feels used and cheated. And if she can’t get it from Jihyo then she just has to hope that there are other fans out there who will understand as well.
But really her nerves, her fear surrounding this album release goes back to knowing that as soon as it’s out, Jihyo will be able listen to it and realize that every word is for her, from the softer, crooning love songs, to the harsh, biting rage rap towards the end. She’ll understand the story that’s being told, and it’ll be a confession both of how Chaeyoung loved her and how much Jihyo hurt her.
Chaeyoung tries to put it out of her mind, tries to tell herself that maybe Jihyo won’t listen to it, that maybe she won’t understand it, that maybe she’ll think it’s about someone else. But if there was one thing about their relationship that Chaeyoung couldn’t question even now, it was that Jihyo was a fan. She would listen to the album as soon as it was released. And there was no way she wouldn’t understand – Jihyo is too smart, too perceptive, and knows Chaeyoung far too well. There’s no avoiding it.
She doesn’t want to do the showcase, doesn’t want to do press. She doesn’t want to do anything after the album is released except go into hiding until the hype has died down. She wants to drop it, get the words and feelings off her back, and then forget about it and move on to the next thing, whatever that may be.
But her contract is clear, as are all the agreements she signed for interviews. So she follows an exhausted Mina from appointment to appointment and tries not to let the fear swallow her whole.
The countdown plays on the TV screen in the green room. There are fifteen minutes left until the album is released. The music video will be uploaded to YouTube, the songs will become available on the major streaming services, and Chaeyoung will step on stage for the showcase.
Chaeyoung feels like she’s going to throw up. She should be focusing on this showcase, should be thinking about the lucky 5,000 fans who had bought tickets as soon as they were available and are waiting for her now, expecting a masterpiece.
But in her mind is Jihyo, maybe sitting on her bed in her room, lit only by the soft orange lamp on her bedside table that she liked to use on dark nights. She’d be wearing those ridiculously expensive and trendy headphones, probably matching them to one of her overly soft designer hoodies. And she’d be listening, brow furrowed, eyes closed.
That’s as far as Chaeyoung gets because the actual expressions Jihyo might make as she begins to understand what Chaeyoung is feeling are beyond her imagination. But she feels a need to know. It’s vindictive but she wants to imagine hurt blossoming across Jihyo’s features. She wants Jihyo to understand how viciously angry at her Chaeyoung is. She wants her to realize that she has become the villain in Chaeyoung’s story.
But frustratingly, infuriatingly Chaeyoung also desperately needs Jihyo to like it. She wants her best fan and her best critic to think that she’s done well. She wants to see satisfaction in her smile, wants to see her bobbing her head, and scrunching her nose up at the parts that Chaeyoung likes best. And she hates that she wants it.
“Are you ready?”
The question startles Chaeyoung out of her quickly deteriorating headspace and she looks up to find Mina holding her microphone. Mina’s expression is firm and the sharpness in it instills some steel into Chaeyoung as well. She glances at the TV timer and sees that there are only a couple of minutes left. Chaeyoung takes the mic from her and stands.
She’s guided by staff with flashlights to her spot on the stage lift and squats down. Mina gives her thigh a quick pat and a nod of assurance. Chaeyoung nods back. She can hear the crowd loud and clear now. Their voices buzz in the soft pre-show hum of conversation, but then the house lights dim and the voices immediately become a roar. Chaeyoung puts her in-ears on and can still hear them.
A member of the crew holds her hands up in a count-down. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
The lift rises and Chaeyoung is immediately blinded by the lights and deafened by the roar of the crowd. She raises a hand in greeting and then starts to sing.
“Incredible f*cking show.”
Jihoon meets her back stage as soon as the showcase is over. He’d apparently been in the audience though Chaeyoung hadn’t noticed him.
“You were f*cking incredible out there.”
Chaeyoung is grateful for his energy. It just serves to prolong the adrenaline high that performing had given her. He’s right. This showcase, despite not even being a proper concert, was one of the best performances she’s ever given. Maybe because she’d poured her heart and soul into this album, maybe because the crowd has been so goddamn loud, maybe because standing in front of her fans again had made her realize that she was f*cking loved. She feels alive for the first time in months.
“We’re going to make so much goddamn money,” Jihoon crows.
He pulls Chaeyoung into a tight, careless hug.
“Do you have any appearances tomorrow?” he asks.
Chaeyoung glances at Mina who shakes her head.
“Nope.”
“Then let’s get f*cking drunk,” Jihoon said. “I already had my friend book us room at his club. Let’s go celebrate.”
Holy sh*t dude!!!
You’re a f*cking genius Son Chaeyoung.
Well done. I knew you would kill it.
There are more people asking for interviews. You’re going to be busy this week. Don’t schedule anything without talking to me first.
I saw your song topped all of the charts. Congratulations!
Chaeyoung had woken with a hangover and more messages on her phone than her brain could process. Jeongyeon, Suga, Jihoon, Mina, and Dahyun all had different reactions to the news. News that Chaeyoung wasn’t even aware of until she opened up her social media accounts. ‘Dreamless’, less than twenty-four hours after release, was sitting firmly at the top of all the major charts in Korea. It had accumulated over 1 million views on YouTube.
For the first time ever, Chaeyoung feels like maybe she’s made it. ‘Dreamless’ isn’t ‘Superstar’. It’s not a watered-down beat made to pull in the masses. ‘Dreamless’ is just Son Chaeyoung distilled down to her rawest components and everyone is hearing it and not only are they hearing it, they’re liking it. Enough to listen, and re-listen, and recommend to their friends, and put on their playlists until it was the most listened to song in Korea.
‘Superstar’ had done that eventually as well, but it had taken weeks and a TikTok trend that Chaeyoung had honestly despised. ‘Dreamless’ does it on its own. Chaeyoung is torn between caring and not. After all, she’s never been one for meaningless numbers. She’s never been one to hinge her talent on the opinions of the masses either, but this has to mean something, right? This has to mean she’s done something good, something worth listening to, something that touched people in a real and meaningful way.
Chaeyoung can barely feel her headache anymore as she answers her messages in turn. Her phone rings immediately after she’s answered Mina.
“You’re up,” her manager says, in that clipped tone that Chaeyoung has started to think of fondly. “Good. How are you feeling?”
“A little hungover, but otherwise great.”
“You saw that ‘Dreamless’ has made top of the charts?”
“Yeah,” Chaeyoung says, trying to push down the proud smile that is fighting its way to her lips.
“We need you at the company ASAP. We’re trying to discuss how to continue this momentum as far as possible. Get dressed. I’m picking you up in twenty minutes. We’ll get breakfast on the way.”
An hour later Chaeyoung finds herself in one of the company’s conference rooms being stared down by Jihoon and about seven other company executives whose names she can never remember. It’s intimidating but they’re all smiling genuine smiles and she’s been congratulated more times than she can count.
“We’re already working on getting you booked at as many end-of-year shows as we can manage,” one of the nameless executives says. “You’re going to get some of the best time slots, which means a lot of eyes.”
“There’s also the possibility for an international tour,” another says, leafing through pages with enough charts and numbers to make Chaeyoung dizzy. “Your numbers are rising outside Korea as well.”
“We’d like to do a little more promo stuff as well,” a third one says. “Maybe a judge on a survival show? We got an offer for that last week.”
Chaeyoung is overwhelmed. Jihoon notices.
“Okay, everyone let’s slow down,” he says. “Look, this meeting isn’t about any of that. This meeting is to tell you that we want to keep this momentum going. I know it’s going to be busy, and we don’t want to over-schedule you, but we don’t want to lose what we have right now. This won’t just help us, but you as well. The more people remember your name the next time you release an album, the more popularity you’ll gain. Do you understand?”
Chaeyoung nods slowly, a little hesitantly.
“Good,” Jihoon says. “These lovely gentlemen are the ones tracking your charts: album sales, music video views, streaming services, mentions on Twitter, fan accounts… They have more information than you could imagine so they’ll be the ones to figure out what kind of things the public might be interested in seeing from you. They will mostly be communicating on the actual planning through Mina, but you should also get to know them. If there are any projects you’d like to pursue, they can help you set those up, and if there are any times where you would like to, for instance, be on vacation or something, let them know so that they can schedule around it. Alright?”
Chaeyoung isn’t sure if it’s alright. It honestly sounds like a lot of work. Distractions from what she really wants to do and what she really wants to achieve. But she knows momentum is important. Knows that better artists than herself have fallen victim to the short attention spans of their listeners and while Chaeyoung wants to believe that her fans will stay by her side, she’s not sure that she wants to risk it.
She nods again, slowly.
“Great!” Jihoon says. “Well, then gentlemen, I’ll leave you to it. Please write up a report and send it to me and Mina, and of course Chaeyoung as well. Unless there are any questions. Meeting dismissed.”
“Mina, can you remind me of the schedule today?”
“You know that it’s in a shared calendar on your phone? You can find that information yourself.”
Chaeyoung pouts at Mina through the rearview and smiles when Mina sighs in defeat.
“We’re on our way to a radio interview with Chung Ha and then a photoshoot for Vogue and then in the afternoon you’re going to be shooting for Yoo Jae Suk’s YouTube channel. We’ll have lunch on the way to the Vogue shoot and Yoo Jae Suk said that you would be eating during the shooting. That should be done by 7pm and then you’re free for the evening.”
“Really?” Chaeyoung asks. “Done at seven? Are you sure?”
Mina nods.
“Yeah, an earlier day for once.”
The relief is clear in Mina’s voice, and it occurs to Chaeyoung that Mina must be at least as exhausted as she is. Chaeyoung wonders what she’ll do with her free evening.
“Are you dating someone?”
Mina’s eyes flit uncertainly to find Chaeyoung’s for a half second in the rearview before she focuses back on the road.
“No,” Mina says. “Why are you asking?”
Chaeyoung shrugs.
“Just curious. I don’t know that much about you. What do you do when you’re home?”
“I play video games a lot. Watch TV. Nothing terribly exciting. This job keeps me busy.”
“They’re talking about hiring more managers for me,” Chaeyoung says. “At least that’s what those guys said in their last email. They said it might get hard for you to handle everything on your own.”
“Is that what you want?” Mina asks neutrally.
“No,” Chaeyoung says. “You know how I feel about change. I only just got used to you. I don’t need any more people hanging around me like that. But… I also feel bad… you have weird hours because of me, and you work a lot, and I don’t know. Maybe you’d like to have time for a boyfriend… do you want more help?”
Mina doesn’t say anything for a while and Chaeyoung wonders if she said something to offend her but when she speaks her voice is the softest Chaeyoung has ever heard it.
“It would be nice to have extra hands, but I like working with you, for you. And I like that I’ve been able to earn your trust. This may be really presumptuous to say, but I feel like I’ve helped you a lot and I’m proud of that. I’m protective of it. I wouldn’t mind help with the administrative stuff, which I hate and maybe a few shifts on really long days. But… I’d like to stay by your side. As much as possible.”
Chaeyoung looks out the window and smiles.
“Yeah,” she answers. “I’d like that too.”
Chaeyoung all but stumbles out of the elevator when it dings for her floor. Today was exhausting. The last of the super exhausting days, Mina had promised. She says it would all get much more manageable starting next week. Chaeyoung needs it to be true because she’s not sure how much more of this her body can take. The day had started at 3 am. That’s when she’d woken up, she’d been on set by 4 and in full make-up by 5. Shooting the commercial had started at 6 am.
Now it’s nearing 10 pm after a long shoot with Running Man and Chaeyoung truly isn’t sure how one foot is landing in front of the other. It’s because she’s tired that she doesn’t notice the person slumped against her doorway until she nearly trips over them. She shouts in surprise and stumbles back, falling back onto her ass.
Her mind immediately flickers to the fanatic followers of idols who would find their addresses and follow them home. She didn’t think she’d reached that level of fame yet but maybe the fact that her song has been at number one for a week and half had instilled some hero worship that she didn’t want. She’s scrambling for her phone, about to call Mina to tell her to call the police when the person speaks.
“Chaeyoung.”
The voice is familiar though raspy with sleep and heavy with drowsiness. Jihyo is blinking slowly and rubbing her neck. She stands disjointedly as if her muscles are stiff. Chaeyoung is almost too startled to feel anything, but there is bile rising her throat as she starts to speak.
“Why the hell are you sleeping in my doorway?” she hisses, as she also makes her way to standing, shaky for entirely different reasons.
Jihyo flinches and clears her throat nervously.
“I heard your album,” she says. “I wanted to see you.”
Chaeyoung scoffs.
“I’m having a concert next month,” she says. “You can buy a ticket. Bring your boyfriend too. I don’t give a f*ck. But you don’t get to just camp outside my apartment like a f*cking-“
Chaeyoung cuts herself off and forces her hands, now lifted into tight fists, back down to her sides. She feels herself coming apart at the seams. She had been doing better. She’d been doing so much better since the releae of the album had allowed her to get those awful feelings off her chest. Seeing Jihyo up close after coming to terms that she’d never have to see her again brings them back in full force.
“Just leave,” she says, doing her best to keep her voice steady and even. “I don’t want to see you.”
“Please, Chaeyoung, wait,” Jihyo says. “Please let me explain.”
“Explain what?” Chaeyoung explodes. “How you made me into a homewrecker? How you used me? How you pretended to give a sh*t about me all while secretly dating some poor schmuck? Does he know about me? Or are you dragging him along as well? Do you even care?”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Jihyo says, her voice choked up with tears. “We’re not dating. We never dated.”
Chaeyoung hears the words, but her mind refuses to understand them. There’s too much anger in her, too much pent up fury from the months she’s spent resenting Jihyo’s entire existence.
“Don’t f*cking lie to me,” Chaeyoung says. “I saw the news. We all f*cking saw it.”
“It’s fake,” Jihyo pleads. “I promise it’s fake. The company told me… I didn’t know what else to do. This was the only way. I never meant to… I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I know I hurt you, but please, please let me explain. You- you at least deserve an explanation.”
Chaeyoung can’t remember a time she’s felt like this before. This furious, out of control anger. Her hands are trembling – actually, her whole body might be trembling – and she can feel her vision blurring at the edges. She’s not sure whether she wants to run or shake Jihyo but her whole body vibrates with this pent up need to do something.
But beneath it all a voice – small and weak and so, so soft – tells Chaeyoung to look at Jihyo. To really, really look at her. She’d kept her eyes from Jihyo’s face, looking everywhere else: at her expensive jeans, at Jihyo’s hands held out in front of her pleading, at the small, silver necklace around her neck. Subconsciously, she’d been avoiding looking any higher, knowing that if there was one thing that could unravel her it would be Jihyo’s eyes.
She wants to hold onto her anger, isn’t ready to let it go, but that tiny voice in her mind is firm, insistent. It’s the part of her that still wants. And through her rage, it manages to get her to look up.
She was right. Jihyo’s eyes haven’t changed. They’re still big and dark and earnest. There’s a plea in them and an apology too. The corners of her eyes glitter with the promise of tears and Chaeyoung feels herself get nauseous with indecision. She wants to pretend the last few months were nothing but a bad dream and hold Jihyo until her heart remembers how to beat right. But she can’t believe what Jihyo is saying. She’s far too scared of being hurt again, of opening herself up to someone when she knows what it’s like to lose her. She’s not sure she could survive it a second time.
She forces herself to look down and wraps her arms around herself. She just wants Jihyo to leave and take this decision out of her hands. But Jihyo doesn’t leave. Instead, she takes a half step closer to Chaeyoung and just whispers a soft, pleading, broken, “Please,” and Chaeyoung caves.
She walks past Jihyo to unlock her door and then steps aside and waits for Jihyo to understand that she’s allowing her to come in. Jihyo just stares for a second and then she cautiously steps past the threshold into the foyer. Chaeyoung kicks off her shoes and drops her bag and doesn’t bother checking to see if Jihyo has done the same. She just walks into her living room to the large glass windows that overlook the city and stares out at the cars moving down below.
She’s afraid of looking at Jihyo again. Hates that one look was all it took to let her back in. If she sees her eyes again, Chaeyoung doesn’t know what she’d give up.
“Chaeyoung,” Jihyo says softly.
“You wanted to explain,” Chaeyoung says. “Get to the point.”
“Can you look at me?”
“No.”
Jihyo sighs.
“I’m sorry-“
“You said that already.”
Jihyo pauses and then takes a deep breath.
“The news about me and Daniel is fake,” Jihyo says. “It was made up by the company.”
Chaeyoung doesn’t say anything but she’s calmer now than she was in the hallway, and it allows her to somewhat process the words. It sounds plausible. Kind of. Or it could be a convenient lie. Chaeyoung doesn’t know what to believe.
“There were pictures of you outside my place,” Jihyo says. “Months ago. Mina probably told you about them. The company buried them, but they were still worried. It could do a lot of damage to my image and to the group. They wanted to do something that would ‘protect’ me. I said no. I didn’t want to. I wanted you and I didn’t want to pretend with someone else. The company said that I’d have to stop seeing you then and I said ‘no’ to that too. I really liked you, Chaeyoung.”
Chaeyoung feels something inside her that she thought had died months ago come alive. She grits her teeth to try to tamp it down.
“I-“ Jihyo continues more hesitantly in the wake of Chaeyoung’s silence. “I wanted to be with you. We hadn’t talked about it, about what we might be, but I thought that we were something and it was enough for me. I didn’t want to end things. I thought…you were worth the risk.”
Chaeyoung digs her nails into her arms in an effort to hold still. Her fight and flight responses are still at odds with one another, paralyzing her. She isn’t sure whether to believe Jihyo’s words or not. She considers that she might never be able to fully believe them. It’s possible that there’s nothing Jihyo could say now that would ever let Chaeyoung trust her again. But, god, she desperately wants to. As always, the intensity of the feeling terrifies her.
“But then… I left for tour and you… you started ignoring me. I thought that maybe I was just a nice distraction for you or something. I thought you didn’t care. I kept trying to reach out and you never…why didn’t you answer?”
Jihyo’s voice cracks with a sob. Suddenly, a new image starts to form in Chaeyoung’s mind. She can picture Jihyo staring at her phone, waiting for a response. Checking between flights, rehearsals, and concerts. Being the first thing she looked at in the morning and last before bed while Chaeyoung was busy convincing herself that she didn’t love her. If what Jihyo is saying is true, if she and Daniel were never together, then the first mistake was definitely Chaeyoung’s.
“I was scared,” Chaeyoung says softly. “I liked you more than I was ready for. I just…”
The excuse sounds incredibly weak even to her own ears. To like someone so much that you ignore them? What sort of grade school bullsh*t is that? Chaeyoung is a grown woman. And maybe she had never had a real relationship before where she’d fallen for real and maybe Jihyo had always seemed too goddamn good to be true but…
Chaeyoung forces herself to stop thinking. She refuses to feel like the asshole after everything Jihyo put her through even if… even if maybe she also put Jihyo through some pain.
“I know,” Jihyo says softly. “I know now, I understand. I listened to your album.”
A chill runs down Chaeyoung’s spine. She feels more vulnerable now than she ever has. She realizes that Jihyo knows her side of the story already. Maybe not the specifics. Maybe not every detail but she knows the feelings recorded into song like a diary and placed into an album for the world to see. For Jihyo to see.
“It was really good,” Jihyo murmurs. “I’m not sure if that means anything coming from me now, but it was really, really good. It’s your most emotional and poignant album by far. I… If I were anyone else, it would be my favorite album of all time.”
Chaeyoung lets the words settle and feels herself relax bit by bit. The urge to run is slowly dissolving. This conversation is easier to navigate. It feels a lot more like her early conversations with Jihyo, before any of the messy feelings. Just two people talking about music like it was the only thing that mattered.
“It… it does still mean something,” Chaeyoung says. “Thank you.”
Jihyo doesn’t say anything after Chaeyoung speaks and finally the curiosity to know what she’s thinking makes Chaeyoung turn. Jihyo has never been particularly tall, but she’s always been able to fill a room. Now she seems to have shrunk into herself and looks tiny standing in the middle of her living room. When she catches Chaeyoung’s eyes, she gives her a tentative smile that Chaeyoung doesn’t return. But she doesn’t look away again either.
“So… it was because I didn’t text back? That’s why you told the company that you would date Kang Daniel?”
“I didn’t say I’d date him, just that they could publish that we had been. He had also gotten into some similar trouble. It would be a win-win. But it wasn’t… it wasn’t because you didn’t text back. I was willing to wait until the tour was over. I thought I’d come back, and we could talk and see if there was something between us to explore further or if you didn’t care. But then…”
Jihyo pauses and takes a deep breath. And to Chaeyoung’s surprise, she notices that Jihyo’s cheeks are starting to flush red, glowing with an embarrassed blush.
“The photos of you and Kim Dahyun came out.”
Chaeyoung’s eyebrows meet her hairline.
“Were you jealous?”
Jihyo’s eyes snap up and she glares. It looks more funny than anything with the way her cheeks are still painted a bright red that trickles down her neck.
“No!” Jihyo snaps, but then seems to reconsider and deflates a little. “I… okay yes, I was. You looked so close with her, and I thought that maybe I didn’t really mean that much to you. You could move on so quickly. Maybe you had already been seeing her while we were still seeing each other. So when the company brought up using Daniel for the fake news again… I said yes. I figured… I figured if you really didn’t care about me, that I shouldn’t risk my career for you. And I… I really didn’t think you’d care.”
“I texted you,” Chaeyoung says. “A few days later… right before the news came out.”
“Yeah, you did. I saw it. It was too late. I had already agreed with the company. And I thought… I was so angry at you for ignoring me already, for moving on so quickly. I thought that you were just bored. Maybe Kim Dahyun was busy that night. I… I didn’t believe it when you said you missed me. I just made me angrier.”
She’s still torn, still confused at how she’s supposed to process what is happening. She really doesn’t have any clue what the hell she’s supposed to do with this new information. But she has figured out one thing: she hurt Jihyo. And yes Jihyo hurt her too, hurt her more. But even if she can’t ever find it in herself to forgive Jihyo… Jihyo might still deserve this apology from her.
“I’m sorry."
“It’s okay,” Jihyo says. “What I did was worse. I… part of me wanted it to hurt you. I didn’t think you cared but I wanted you to. I wanted you to see the news and know what it feels like to be replaced. It was… I was being childish. I was just so hurt. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I wanted my album to hurt you too,” Chaeyoung admits. “I knew you’d listen to it and… I didn’t write it to hurt you, but I wanted you to be hurt when you heard it. I wanted you to… to know that I hated you.”
Jihyo nods slowly and tears spill over on her cheeks, collecting at the point of her chin before dripping down to her arms that are crossed over her chest.
“I’m sorry,” Jihyo says again. “I’m so sorry.”
Chaeyoung deflates fully at the apology and slides down to the couch to sit with her head in her hands. She’s still so confused. Her head is spinning, and she wishes that this could be easy, that she could just know what to do next, but everything feels impossibly difficult.
“I don’t know what to do next,” she says softly. “I’m just so… I spent the last few months hating you.”
“Me too,” Jihyo says. “I- I really thought I never wanted to see you again.”
“What changed your mind?”
“The album,” Jihyo says. “I hated you because I thought you didn’t like me the way I liked you, but… that’s not what the album said. Unless… unless it wasn’t about me?”
A tinge of hesitation blooms in her tone. Chaeyoung feels herself chuckle under her breath. As if it could have been about anything else. As if Jihyo weren’t smart enough to realize that herself.
“It was,” she says. “There was never anyone else.”
“I-I, well, I mean I just…”
Chaeyoung lifts her head from her hands to see Jihyo looking extremely flustered, and she almost laughs. Can’t quite manage with the weight of this conversation over her but she has the fleeting though that Jihyo looks cute like this.
“I mean, that’s what I thought,” she manages to say, coughing a little awkwardly at the end. “I just… I heard ‘Murmurs’ and I realized that if it was about me…” Jihyo trails off.
“If it was about you what?”
“If it was about me… I had made a terrible mistake,” Jihyo’s voice thickens with held back tears. “I kept listening to the album and there was suddenly this shift. It was the angriest music I’ve ever heard. You’ve never done music like it before, but ‘Desolation’ was a masterpiece in rage rap. The shift to the heavy metal guitars at the end-“ Jihyo seems to catch herself spiralling into a fangirl and stops. “And then ‘Dreamless’… I didn’t want the album to be about me when I heard that song. I wanted it to be someone else who was to blame for hurting you like that. But I knew as soon as I heard it that it was all my fault.”
Jihyo is full on crying now.
“I realized that I had gotten my wish. I had hurt you in exactly the way I had wanted except that I didn’t want to hurt you anymore. As soon as the news was out, I regretted it, but I couldn’t take it back and I was too embarrassed to text you and tell you the truth. I regret it even more now because I was wrong. You did just feel the same and if I had just waited until I was back to talk to you like an adult… This could have all been avoided.”
Chaeyoung doesn’t disagree. She can’t. But wasn’t she just the same? God, maybe they did deserve each other.
“I was just as bad,” she says tiredly. “We both… neither of us talked about it. We both let it fall apart. Me before you.”
Jihyo nods. Silence falls. Chaeyoung doesn’t know what to do next. She feels like she could forgive Jihyo now but has no clue what that looks like. And forgiveness doesn’t mean that they can go back to how they were. Does Chaeyoung even want that anymore? She has no clue. She’s just so, so tired.
“I need some time,” she says finally, forcing herself to look Jihyo in the eye.
She sees a flicker of disappointment in Jihyo’s expression, but the other woman nods quickly.
“I understand,” she says. “I can wait. For as long as it takes.”
“I can call Mina to take you home,” Chaeyoung says.
“It’s okay. My manager is waiting downstairs.”
Chaeyoung stands up and awkwardly tries to figure out how to say goodbye to Jihyo.
“I’ll see you around,” Jihyo says, clearly sensing her hesitation.
“I’ll text you,” Chaeyoung says. “I promise. One way or another… I’ll text you.”
“I’ll wait,” Jihyo answers. “I promise.”
Chaeyoung walks Jihyo to the front door, hovering as Jihyo slips her shoes back on.
“Have a good night,” she says, and then kicks herself internally for it.
“You too,” Jihyo says.
She slips out of the apartment quietly and Chaeyoung finds herself staring at the front door, feeling distinctly as if she’s been hit by a baseball bat.
“You’ve been distracted all day,” Mina grumbles. “Can you please try to focus so we can get out of this photoshoot before midnight?”
Chaeyoung looks at her and then glances at the crew who are dragging their feet and yawning. She nods guiltily. She hadn’t meant to hold things up, but her mind isn’t in it. Any attempts to think of anything other than Jihyo, including this photoshoot, have been entirely unsuccessful. She wants to text her, but still has no clue what she’d say.
The photographer calls for her attention and asks her to lean back and tuck her chin a little. Chaeyoung follows his instructions and puts on the facial expression she thinks he’s looking for. He tells her to hold as he snaps a few pictures.
Jihyo had seemed sincere. Chaeyoung has come to that conclusion at least. She wants to believe her. She wants to trust the person that she’d thought Jihyo was – not a cheater nor someone so selfish as to string someone along for no reason. Jihyo had always seemed honest almost to a fault and kind. Chaeyoung wants to believe in that version of her. But-
“Miss Son!”
Chaeyoung snaps back to attention, shooting the direction an apologetic glance. His expression is tired and a little annoyed.
“Could you please cross your legs?” he asks. “And put your hand out behind you?”
Chaeyoung follows his instructions and tries to focus on the camera lens. If she believes Jihyo though, she has to take responsibility for her role in the way things had fallen apart with Jihyo, about how if only she hadn’t been so goddamn scared of being happy she might have answered Jihyo’s text messages. And if she had done that… where might they be now?
“Alright, now lean forward please,” Chaeyoung vaguely hears the director say.
Maybe after this shoot she’d be asking Mina to drive her to Jihyo’s apartment. She’d ask to use her shower, with the implication that Jihyo was welcome to join her. And afterwards, she’d curl up against Jihyo’s side while Jihyo picked an album for them to listen to together. She had a vast collection of vinyl records that Chaeyoung had been slowly making her way through. Maybe they’d listen to it quietly with Jihyo’s fingers in Chaeyoung’s still damp hair and they’d point out things they liked, argue about the lyrics, and talk about how they’d implement that beat or that motif into their own songs. Maybe Chaeyoung would press a kiss to Jihyo’s cheek and nuzzle deeper into her side until the music lulled them both to sleep.
“Miss Son! Please! I just need one more set of photos. Please focus!”
The photographer has clearly lost an any all patience that he had. Chaeyoung blushes and pinches her thigh to focus. She glances at where Mina stands off to the side, watching. She expects to see that overly familiar frustrated frown that Mina was always quick to give her, but instead she just sees concern etched across her manager’s brow.
“Almost done,” Mina mouths.
Chaeyoung nods and turns back to the front. She manages to pull herself together enough to get through the last round of photos. When the clearly exasperated photographer dismisses her, she apologizes profusely for being distracted and apologizes to the crew as well before thanking them for their hard work.
“I already bought them all dinner,” Mina says as they slip into the car. “I’ll also write a personalized card to the photographer tomorrow that you should sign.”
“Sorry,” Chaeyoung says.
“It’s okay. We’ve been working you too hard these last few weeks.”
Chaeyoung could correct her and tell her that her exhaustion has nothing to do with why she couldn’t keep her thoughts in order during the photoshoot. Chaeyoung still doesn’t have her thoughts in order enough to try to verbalize them. She knows what she wants with Jihyo. She wants to just go back in time and forget any of this happened. She wants to be able to think of her without thinking of all the pain she caused. She wants to not be scared. She wants to be willing to take the risk of being hurt, wants to trust that Jihyo won’t hurt her again.
She pulls out her phone as she’s done time and time again and opens up her text message chain with Jihyo. She reads the last messages she sent. The I miss you hurts to read. It feels as true now as it was then.
Her thumbs hover over the keyboard as she tries to think of something to write but her mind is paralyzed. She can’t stop thinking about what it felt like to read the title of that news article after sending that last message. It didn’t seem to matter that the story hadn’t turned out to be real, the pain in that moment had been very real. Could Chaeyoung really trust that Jihyo would never put her through that again?
She sighs out in frustration and tosses the phone to her side. She sees Mina glance back at her with concern and just averts her gaze. She’ll think about it some more and try again later. In the meantime, she needs to try to get her head on straight.
Mina warns her that preparations for the end of year shows will be tiring but Chaeyoung will get a week to relax before they really have to start rehearsing properly. Chaeyoung takes the break with open arms, not setting her alarm and sleeping until the afternoon sun shines in her eyes, waking her gently in it’s warm glow.
Unfortunately, Jihoon doesn’t seem to get the memo about the break and on her first real day off, he wanders into her studio as she’s getting some much needed alone time with her DAW and pulls up a chair. Chaeyoung immediately feels a sense of foreboding at his expression. He looks just a little too excited.
“Hear me out before you say no,” he says. “I have an offer for you.”
Chaeyoung already knows she’s going to hate whatever he has to say, but Jihoon doesn’t give her a chance to stop him.
“We got another request for a song for an idol.”
Chaeyoung’s upper lip begins to curl.
“It’s a soloist, not a group, and we weren’t given specifics of who but it’s out of JYP and the request was for a female artist. Itzy and NMIXX are still too close to their rookie days to have solo songs. So by process of elimination it must be for one of the Twice members.”
Chaeyoung opens her mouth, but Jihoon holds up his hand to silence her.
“I know you’re against working with idols, but a solo artist allows for more freedom. And I know you don’t care about exposure, but this would be an easy way to prolong the success you’ve had and pull in another audience. Don’t answer me now, okay? Just think about it and let me know tomorrow.”
He stands quickly and walks out before she can say anything.
Chaeyoung thinks about Jihyo. Of the members of Twice it would make sense if it were her. Im Nayeon had her solo debut the year before. Jihyo had talked about it proudly but with just a hint of jealousy. And while Jihyo was the second youngest in the group, she was also the leader, the strongest vocalist, and as far as Chaeyoung knew, the most musically artistic. It would make sense if it were her, and if it were…
Chaeyoung wakes to another headline.
JYPE and KONNECT Entertainment confirm that Park Jihyo and Kang Daniel have split.
Chaeyoung re-reads the headline three times, each time as if it might give her some more information. When it becomes clear that she’s not going to learn anything new, she reads the article. It’s empty of real details.
“After nine months of dating, Jihyo and Daniel have decided to part ways as their busy schedules prevented them from meeting frequently. The artists remain on good terms and will stay as friends. We ask for respect for their privacy during this time.”
Huh. The timing of the article is… it’s been less than a week since she’d last seen Jihyo. Jihyo must have told the company that she was done with the pretense. Or maybe the company had decided that the news had done what it needed to protect Jihyo’s image.
She pulls out her phone, opens her chat with Jihyo and finally sends a message.
Are you going to debut as a soloist?
Probably not the text Jihyo was expecting but barely ten seconds later there’s a reply.
How the hell did you find that out?
Got a request to write a song for a solo member of a JYP girl group. Figured it had to be you.
You’re right… Are you going to take the job?
Chaeyoung considers. She thinks about her reservations about Jihyo, thinks about the headline, timed perfectly with Jihyo’s promise that it wasn’t real, that nothing had ever happened with Daniel. She also thinks about Jihyo. Park Jihyo. Chaeyoung wants to work with an artist of her caliber, has dreamed about collaborating with someone like her since she first started writing. Idol or not… Chaeyoung thinks she’d be stupid to turn down this opportunity.
Chaeyoung’s fingers hover over the DAW. She’s been trying to write the song for Jihyo for a week now and she’s barely made any headway. Everything she’s started has ended up scrapped upon a second listen. She sighs as she deletes the last hour of work and leans back in her chair, tipping her head back to stare up at the ceiling. It doesn’t help that it’s late. She’s trying to squeeze this session in after a long day of rehearsal for her upcoming performance for the Golden Disk award ceremony. The end of year shows are dumb in Chaeyoung’s opinion, but there’s no convincing Jihoon or Mina of that. So she’s stuck trying to plan different performances for each of the seven end of year shows she now has to attend. Why they all have to be different is beyond her, but it means fresh rounds of rehearsals with the back-up dancers and the stage designers for each award show. She’s exhausted and it’s not really helping her creativity bloom.
She puts her fingers back onto her mouse and drums them lazily as she tries to figure out what she wants to do. She tries flipping through old samples but none of them feel like they could work for Jihyo. She wonders if she’s going to have to tell Jihoon that she failed, that she wasn’t able to write a song like she promised. He’d have to be the one to tell JYPE and that would be…bad. He’s never actually been angry with her before, but this would likely be the moment to change that.
She checks the time. It’s nearly midnight and she has another stage rehearsal starting at 9am tomorrow. She needs to go home. Mina left hours ago after Chaeyoung had promised that she’d get home on her own at a reasonable hour. She’s pretty sure that promise has been broken already.
She needs inspiration for this song, but she knows it can’t come from within her. The song, at the end of the day, still needs to be Jihyo’s. Months ago, Chaeyoung wouldn’t have had any issue. But now… Chaeyoung feels like she doesn’t really know Jihyo anymore. She used to think of Jihyo in bursting color, vibrant and full. But it’s been months since they last spent time together and the Jihyo in her memories is just a watered down mirage of who she really is.
It may have been a mistake to take on this task. Chaeyoung may be stupid for thinking that she could separate who Jihyo was as an artist from the person who had really only managed to completely unravel her. The longer she has spent in this studio, the more her choices have become clear. Chaeyoung can either tell Jihoon that she won’t have the song done in time and reap the consequences, or she can figure out what the f*ck she’s feeling and get rid of this turmoil that is holding her back.
One of those feels a lot easier than the other. Jihoon will forgive her. She’s too valuable an artist for him not to. And he’s on good terms with JYPE so they’ll forgive him too. All in all, it would take a single text message and then Chaeyoung could go on with her life. The other option is much, much scarier because it either means closing the door on the chapter of her life that includes Jihyo or facing Jihyo and trusting.
“You know, it’s a good thing that a) I have your location on my phone and thought to check it before driving to your apartment this morning and b) that your rehearsal is here in this building and not somewhere else. I knew I should have driven you home last night,” Mina says.
Chaeyoung does her best to process the words as she blinks herself to consciousness. The studio lights are far too bright, and she buries her face back into her arms. Her neck is aching, and the sleeve of her hoodie is wet with drool. She has no clue when she drifted off last night.
“What time is it?”
Her voice sounds like she’s been chain smoking her whole life. She takes the bottle of water Mine hands her gratefully and drinks half of it without taking a breath.
“8:45,” Mina says. “You have fifteen minutes to get yourself presentable and down to rehearsals. I brought you a brush and a clean shirt. Also a toothbrush if you want. Why the hell didn’t you go home?”
Chaeyoung stares at her computer and sighs. After hours of deliberation, instead of making a decision, she had decided to … keep trying to write even if she knew it was pointless. She has nothing to show for it other than a much fuller Trash folder and a kink in her neck.
“I was trying to write that song for JYPE Jihoon asked for,” she says.
Mina is silent as Chaeyoung stands, stretching her arms over her head and rolling her neck out a little. She feels about seven joints crack.
“Is this a good idea, Chaeyoung?”
“Sleeping in the studio? Nope… terrible idea. I regret it already. Why did you let me do this?”
Mina scoffs.
“Let you? You’re a grown ass adult. And that’s not what I was talking about. I meant working with Jihyo. I know she and that guy never really dated and that it was all a misunderstanding but…”
“But what?”
Mina purses her lips. Her expression turns suddenly dark.
“I was the one who had to help you after,” Mina says. “She hurt you. She really, really hurt you. It’s not so simple as whether she was dating him or not. She let the news come out and didn’t warn you, didn’t explain until months later. I just… I never want to see you like that again.”
This is the most serious Chaeyoung has ever seen Mina, and for someone who smiles maybe once a week, that’s saying something. If she’s being honest, her memories of the few days after she’d first found out about Jihyo and Daniel are a bit hazy. But she remembers how she completely forgot how to take care of herself until Mina forced her to shower and eat again. She wonders how she must have looked in her manager’s eyes back then.
“I don’t want to feel like that again either,” Chaeyoung says. “But… her not telling me was my fault. I was the one who cut communication first. After I did that she didn’t owe it to me anymore.”
“Do you really think it’s that simple?” Mina asks.
No, of course not, Chaeyoung thinks. If it were that simple, I wouldn’t be struggling this much. Chaeyoung runs her fingers along the seam of one of her lyric notebooks. It’s the one that she’d used to write the first tracks about Jihyo. She’d read through them the night before looking for inspiration but instead had found memories.
“Do you know why she was able to hurt me that much?” she asks. She doesn’t wait for a response. “Because before all that … she made me so happy. I don’t know how to explain that she was the first person I’ve met who made me feel like… myself, but more. I’ve never liked anyone the way I liked her. So losing that was… incredibly painful but at the same time, I want to feel it again. I want to be happy like that.”
Mina hands Chaeyoung the bag with the change of clothes and the brush.
“You should change. You have to be in the practice room in 5.”
It seems like she’s decided that the conversation is over and Chaeyoung gets it because this is where all of her internal deliberations have ended. With one side telling her that the risk of being hurt is too great while the other tells her that the chance of happiness is worth it. It feels like a tug of war where both sides are equally matched.
“Are you two talking now?”
Mina’s voice stops Chaeyoung from leaving to the bathroom to change. She turns back to look at her manager
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know how to talk to her when I still don’t know what I want from her or what I feel.”
“But you chose to write the song?”
Mina’s expression is sharp and thoughtful like it is whenever she has to come up with a solution to some snag in their plans. Chaeyoung feels scrutinized and it makes her squirm a little.
“I… yeah.”
“Why?”
“I… I honestly don’t know.”
Mina thoughtful pout deepens into a frown and then her expression clears completely. She steps forward to lightly push Chaeyoung out of the studio and towards the bathroom. Chaeyoung allows herself to be led, a little bewildered.
“Change,” Mina says. “And then… then you should text Jihyo.”
“Huh?”
“If you haven’t cut her out of your life entirely after what she did, that means that you don’t think it’s unforgivable. You think you could forgive her, given enough time. And if she really made you that happy… it’s just a matter of time. You’re still hurting a little, but that’ll fade. That desire to be happy though… that won’t ever go away.”
Mina doesn’t let Chaeyoung answer that statement. She forces her into a stall so that she can change and walks out of the bathroom.
Hey
Chaeyoung erases the three letters.
Do you want to meet?
She erases that too.
I was writing your song, but I’m having trouble because I feel like I don’t know you that well anymore because it’s been months since we really hung out and in the middle of that you broke my heart a little bit. And I want to know you again, but I also don’t want to be afraid of it. So do you want to come spend some time together working on this song so that I can use professionalism as an excuse to ease into getting to know you again?
Chaeyoung stares at the message. It would be crazy to send but it would be the most honest thing she could say. She erases it.
Do you have time to come to the studio and discuss the song? I’d like your input on the direction you’re hoping for in this album.
It takes four re-reads but eventually Chaeyoung sends the message. She tosses her phone back into her bag immediately, using the start of rehearsal as an excuse to not keep it near her. Really, she just doesn’t want to anticipate Jihyo’s reply. She wants to just hope that she’ll have answered by the end of practice and in the meantime, trying to remember the formations will be more than enough distraction for Chaeyoung. She’s really not a dancer and the choreography is incredibly simple, but she’s used to moving freely on stage and remembering where she’s supposed to move and when is taking a good amount of her brain power.
It's harder than ever today, because despite Chaeyoung’s decision to not check her phone, she can’t stop thinking about it, wondering if Jihyo has answered. On the first break, she all but lunges at her phone.
Sure. I am available tomorrow afternoon. What time?
Chaeyoung breathes a sigh of relief, though she had never doubted for a second that Jihyo would say yes.
Come around at 3. Bring your lyrics notebook.
Okay. I’ll see you then.
The messages are professional, lacking much of the warmth that had characterized their previous texts, but each one still alights a flutter in her chest. She still hates this feeling, hates that the barest of minimums from Jihyo can affect her so much. It’s terrifying still. But Chaeyoung is starting to think that Mina was right. It’s only a matter of time before she gives in.
“It’s good to see you,” Jihyo says as she enters the studio. “I’m glad you reached out.”
Chaeyoung nods. Everything feels awkward. There’s a distance between them that Chaeyoung isn’t used to. Their initial friendship had happened so quickly, so naturally that even despite Chaeyoung’s initial f*ckup, there hadn’t really been this awkward phase. Now, Jihyo feels even more like a stranger than when they’d first met.
“I wanted… want to do this justice,” Chaeyoung says. “You deserve the best I can offer.”
“Better than ‘Dreamless’?” Jihyo asks in that sardonic tone of hers that Chaeyoung loves above anything else.
“I, um, I’d like to try… but maybe-“
Jihyo cuts her off with a bright laugh.
“I’m kidding,” she says. “Don’t stress. Just show me what you have so far?”
“I, um, I don’t really have anything yet,” Chaeyoung says.
Disappointing Jihyo still sucks, Chaeyoung finds as Jihyo’s smile falters.
“It’s not cause I haven’t been working on it!” Chaeyoung is quick to clarify. “It’s just that I haven’t written that much for other people and it’s a little bit out of my genre so… I keep getting stuck. And so I thought maybe… maybe if I could hear what you were thinking for the song then it would be easier.”
“You want to write it with me?”
“Um, if that’s okay?”
Jihyo has that expression again, one that Chaeyoung hasn’t seen in months: pure reverence. The joy of a child meeting their hero for the first time. Of a fan, getting to talk to their favorite celebrity. Of someone completely awed that the universe had allowed for this circ*mstance to come to be.
“I would be truly honored,” Jihyo says softly. “You have no idea how much this means to me… As a fan, I mean.”
Chaeyoung has always been a little unsure of what to do with Jihyo’s admiration for her, and time hasn’t made it any better. So she simply turns away and takes a seat, grabbing her headphones.
“You brought your lyrics book?” Chaeyoung asks. “I want to make a song about something you care about. We can start from there to get a vibe and then if you have ideas on the melody or whatever, we can try to incorporate that as well.”
Pulling up Suga’s chair, Jihyo starts flipping through her notebook. Chaeyoung takes the opportunity to observe her. She looks serious, thoughtful, but she’s so pretty it takes Chaeyoung’s breath away. Chaeyoung thinks that she didn’t take enough of these opportunities before to just observe her. Maybe because she didn’t realize that her time might be limited. She looks now, cataloguing the way Jihyo’s skin seems to glow under the studio lights and the way her hair falls softly around her shoulders.
“We… um, we don’t have to use my lyrics,” Jihyo says suddenly, slamming her notebook closed. “You’re a much better lyricist anyway, so-“
“What are you talking about? You’re a great lyricist. What about that song that you showed me that one time?”
Chaeyoung tries her best not to remember the circ*mstances around that time. How her body had been languid and warm from Jihyo’s touch, how she’d laid in Jihyo’s bed in only Jihyo’s t-shirt, how Jihyo’s hair had been mussed and lips swollen. It’s not the important part of that memory anyway. The important part was how Jihyo had watched her carefully, intensely, with those dark eyes of hers as Chaeyoung had read what she’d written and felt the words etched into her mind forever.
“Oh, well, those…” Jihyo stutters. “I don’t know if they’re good enough and-”
“They are. Are they in that notebook?”
“Um, yeah.”
Jihyo flips through the pages and then hands it open once she’s found what she needed. Chaeyoung reads through the words carefully, remembering them and with it remembering all the conversations she’s had with Jihyo about wanting to escape it all. Chaeyoung runs her fingers along the text carefully breaking down each line into its parts.
“Did you have a melody in mind when you wrote these?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“Can you sing it for me?”
Jihyo takes a slow breath and then nods. She takes the notebook back from Chaeyoung and starts to sing softly along with the words. Despite her obvious nerves and the lack of certainty, her voice tone is smooth and pleasant. The melody is simple. But it’s nice – even and steady. Chaeyoung has some ideas to make it a little more interesting, enticing, but Jihyo had chosen a lower-range sound that suits her well. It wasn’t the belting that Chaeyoung was used to hearing from her. Instead, it sounded a lot more like her speaking voice.
It made Chaeyoung think of their murmured conversations, spoken in the low lights of Jihyo’s room or the balcony of Chaeyoung’s apartment. The ones where they didn’t argue but instead just talked. Jihyo makes it through the first chorus and then stops, looking cautiously at Chaeyoung with her dark, wide eyes.
“Okay,” Chaeyoung says, suddenly feeling a little destabilized. “That’s good. Let’s start with that. It sounds like a pretty smooth, relaxed sound. So we won’t do any crazy bass or drums. But you’re singing in your register so we should have some bass. And if you’re singing low, maybe we have the instrumental start a little higher. Tell me if I’m wrong, but you’re going for a pretty simple arrangement right?”
Jihyo nods.
“Okay, so I’m feeling a sort of dreamlike feel around this. You don’t want this to be sad, right?”
“Bittersweet,” Jihyo answers.
“Okay, got it. Give me a few minutes. Actually, can you sing that again into the mic? We can re-record later, but I want to get your voice into the arrangement as soon as possible.”
Jihyo nods and moves in a little closer to approach the microphone.
“Okay, go ahead.”
“I think the string synths are too strong,” Jihyo says. “Can we tone it down? Or maybe get rid of it?”
“If we get rid of it, it’ll sound really empty. I know we’re going for minimal, but there is such a thing as too minimal.”
“Okay, then let’s put something else in.”
“Like what?”
“I… I don’t know.”
Chaeyoung likes the strings, personally, but she can see where Jihyo is coming from. She could just turn them down, blend the into the background a little bit more, but it would probably sound a little too hazy if she did that.
“How about… what if instead of a full strings synth, we do just a single violin.”
Jihyo looks skeptical but nods. It takes a few minutes to make the edit to the section they’re editing in this moment. Jihyo sits quietly, watching her work, but despite her silence, Chaeyoung is hyper aware of her eyes on her.
“Okay, how’s this?”
She plays the new version with the lone violin. Jihyo listens and then nods.
“It’s better. I think it could still be quieter. But the single string is much better.”
Chaeyoung adjusts the levels and plays it again.
“Better.”
“I think you should go up in this part,” Chaeyoung says. “It sounds too one-note if you stay low the whole time.”
“I like the low,” Jihyo says. “I’m not trying to belt in this song.”
“It doesn’t need to be a belt but the way it is now, is lacking dynamics.”
Jihyo’s eyes spark with a competitive fire. When they used to argue over stupid philosophical stuff, that look had usually meant that Chaeyoung was going to be embarrassingly outmaneuvered. But this is her domain. She knows songs. She knows what this one needs, even if Jihyo seems to be against it.
“If I go up it’ll have too many dynamics. I want it to be soothing.”
“But not boring,” Chaeyoung is quick with the answer. “Look, I’m not telling you to jump an octave and sing the rest of the chorus in your head voice. But I think going up here, to hit this note and then come back down for a low finish would work better.”
Jihyo seems like she’s going to argue but Chaeyoung stops her.
“Just try it my way, and if you really hate it we’ll never have to do it again, I promise.”
Jihyo glares and then deflates with a sigh.
“Fine. How do you think it should go?”
“Told you so.”
“Shut up.”
“Okay,” Chaeyoung says. “I think we’re good for now.”
“Yeah?” Jihyo sounds skeptical.
“Yeah, I can finish the rest on my own and make the demo to send to your company.”
Jihyo bites her lower lip.
“Are you sure there’s nothing more you want to do right now?” she asks.
“No, why? Is there something you’d like to change? Just let me know and we can fix it,” Chaeyoung says. “Is it the bridge?”
“No,” Jihyo says quickly. “No, I like it. It’s good.”
Chaeyoung looks back at her computer and hits the save button about fifteen times to make sure that it’s all saved. She glances at the clock and sees that it’s only 8pm. Much earlier than she had thought it would be considering all the trouble this song had been giving her until this point. But Jihyo was a much better songwriter than she gave herself credit for. She had a very clear idea of what she wanted and was good at expressing it. It helped that her vocal control allowed her to completely change the sound of a song by simply changing her tone a little. As long as she gets out of the Golden Disk dress rehearsals on time tomorrow, Chaeyoung thinks she could get the demo finished by the end of the day.
She stands stretching her arms above her head to loosen up her spine which had started to tighten from sitting. Jihyo follows her lead, her crop top riding up distractingly and forcing Chaeyoung to stare at the ground to avoid getting caught ogling.
“Are you headed home now?” Jihyo asks as she gathers her stuff.
“Yeah,” Chaeyoung says. “Dinner, a TV show, then bed.”
“Can I offer you dinner with me instead?”
Chaeyoung freezes and looks up at her.
“If you don’t want to, I understand. If this was just work for you and nothing more, I understand that too,” Jihyo says. “But I had fun the last few hours even though we were arguing for half of it and … I miss you. I miss talking to you and being around you. It doesn’t have to be more than just dinner, either.”
It’s faster than Chaeyoung had wanted to move but the last few hours with Jihyo, even under the guise of professionalism, had been the most engaging of the last few months. It feels so dangerous, but Chaeyoung is already falling back into her addictive energy.
“I… sure, dinner sounds nice.”
“How was your tour?” Chaeyoung asks as she scoops ramen into her mouth.
Jihyo shrugs. She takes a bite, chewing and swallowing before answering.
“It was fun. Tours are always fun. Tiring but still fun. I was a little sad because a friend of mine stopped messaging me while I was away. I thought I’d upset her.”
It’s not clear to Chaeyoung how she’s supposed to react to that statement. It sounds like Jihyo is joking but is this really a joking matter?
“Sorry,” Chaeyoung says.
“Oh you thought I was talking about you? I have other friends you know,” Jihyo’s grin can only be described as sh*t-eating.
Chaeyoung feels something in her light up. Jihyo is joking with her, teasing her, and that has always made something in her light up. To hear her joking about this particular thing helps relieve some of the awkwardness between them. Chaeyoung wonders when she’ll be able to joke about Kang Daniel. It still stings too much right now but maybe one day she’ll find something funny in it.
“You’re so annoying.”
Jihyo seems pleased at that for some reason, and it only annoys Chaeyoung more.
“How was the showcase for the album?”
“Good. Fun. The crowd was great, and it always feels good performing songs for the first time like that. It’s like it only becomes real when I hear the fans.”
“I saw clips afterwards,” Jihyo says. “I regretted not getting tickets. It looked amazing. I… I really wish I could see you perform one day.”
“You know, you say you’re my fan, but you’ve never been to any of my concerts.”
“Are you calling me a fake fan again? I thought we were past that.”
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m well aware of how much you like me.”
Speaking thoughtlessly has always gotten Chaeyoung into trouble and she wants to punch herself when an awkward silence falls between them again. They’d managed to carefully balance working on Jihyo’s song and this dinner so far by pretending. Pretending that they had never hurt each other, pretending that they had only ever been friends. It was like they both understood that any mention of their relationship past that was still far too heavy a topic to dismantle when their new found friendship was only just starting to find its footing.
Chaeyoung clears her throat, determined to not let silence fall for too long.
“I’ll give you tickets to my next concert,” she says. “I don’t know when it’ll be yet, but… if you’re not on tour or whatever, I’ll make sure you get tickets.”
Jihyo’s eyes find hers.
“I’d like that.”
“Chaeyoung! Chaeyoung! Look over here!”
“Chaeyoung! How does it feel to win?”
“Chaeyoung! Congratulations on the award! Chaeyoung!”
The crowd pulses around her and Chaeyoung can feel her bodyguards struggling. She wonders if they’ll be able to handle it. This crowd is worse than any she’s seen before. She’s blinded by the flashing cameras and deafened by the shouts for her attention. She wishes she could find her fans to wave at them, but she’s so disoriented, she doesn’t even know where she’s walking, trusting her guards to get her to where she needs to go.
They manage to get her to the car, and she slips in. Mina rolls down her window and Chaeyoung waves a couple of times before putting it up again. She can still hear the crowd screaming through the closed window.
“Congratulations,” Mina says. “I already got you food. It’s waiting in the hotel room. Are you sure you want me to be your plus one?”
“You always want me to network at these things and I hate doing that, so I figure if you come with me you can network for me, and I can get drunk.”
Mina looks at her reproachfully in the rearview mirror and Chaeyoung flashes her a cheeky smile.
It turns out that Chaeyoung didn’t need Mina to network for her. The difference a year can make is overwhelming. The minute she enters the club, she’s swarmed by people. Some she recognizes as other artist that had been at the awards ceremony. Others she’s not sure, but Mina seems to recognize some of them. It feels weird to sign autographs at a closed event like this, to have other celebrities fawning over her. It feels especially weird to have a rookie idol group come up to her with hero worship clear in their expressions.
Chaeyoung is immediately overwhelmed. She does her best to wade through the attention but each time she finishes talking to one person, another takes their place. Eventually, just as she thinks she’s about go crazy, Mina steps in, masterfully maneuvering her out of the crowd to a less crowded part of the club. It’s dark enough that people likely won’t catch sight of her unless they accidentally get close enough. She sinks back onto one of the leather benches and lets out a slow breath.
“Stay here,” Mina says. “I’ll get you a drink.”
“Two, please.”
“Fine.”
Chaeyoung tips her head back and sighs. She had been able to mostly shield herself from the effects of her increased celebrity by simply not going out in public. While she could hear the louder screams at her concerts, she hadn’t had to be in the thick of it until tonight. The whole night had been overwhelming from the red carpet to leaving the venue to now at the afterparty. Maybe now that she’s shown face she could just go home.
“Son Chaeyoung-ssi,” she hears a voice say. “I’m a really big fan of yours.”
Getting caught in her hiding place would have been terrible except that Chaeyoung recognizes the voice. Warm like honey with a hint of teasing. She lifts her head up to find Jihyo, looking absolutely stunning in her award show clothes, smiling down at her, holding a beer in one hand and a glass of water in the other.
“Mina asked me to give these to you. She said drink the water first and that your second drink is coming. She got caught up talking to an exec from Samsung. Something about an advertisem*nt deal? She looked excited.”
Chaeyoung takes the water and obediently drinks it as Jihyo takes a seat next to her, almost close enough for their knees to touch. It’s been much more comfortable between them since the recording session turned dinner a few days before. They had even texted a little, at first just about the song but then about their days and the possibility of maybe getting dinner again at some point. It was much easier
“So, Park Jihyo,” she says. “Is ‘Superstar’ still your favorite song?”
Jihyo shrugs and then laughs.
“Nope. I have a new favorite.”
Chaeyoung tilts her head.
“’Dreamless’?”
Jihyo scoffs.
“Isn’t liking a number one song a little cliché? Isn’t that something only teenage fans who find your songs on TikTok do?”
Chaeyoung hasn’t had a drop to drink yet but she feels a little hazy. She wonders once again, what it is about Jihyo that disarms her so completely without trying.
“You’re right,” Chaeyoung says. “I hate people who chase trends.”
Jihyo laughs and the low lights catch the glitter in her make-up.
“Which one then? If not ‘Dreamless’?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Chaeyoung does want to know. For some reason no piece of information has ever felt as important as this before. She leans in until their knees are touching. Jihyo’s skin is warm, but it feels like it’s burning against Chaeyoung’s skin.
“I would,” Chaeyoung says honestly. “I really, really would.”
Jihyo regards Chaeyoung carefully. Her eyes flicker between Chaeyoung’s as if unsure of which she wants to look until they drop to Chaeyoung’s lips. Chaeyoung wonders if Jihyo is aware of how she bites her lower lip before she drags her eyes back up. They’re close. Too close, really, if Chaeyoung was still trying to keep distance between them, but it’s useless. She doesn’t really think she’s in control of what she’s doing anymore.
“I like ‘Murmurs’,” Jihyo says. “You don’t write many love songs but that one… the person that it’s about is really lucky. It would be a shame if they did something to f*ck it up.”
They haven’t been talking about it. Their texts have covered everything under the sun except for this one topic. This apology that Jihyo is waiting for Chaeyoung to accept. Jihyo has been patient giving her space ahd she was grateful for it.The thing is that, Mina was right. It was only a matter of time.
“Did she?” Jihyo whispers, voice trembling. “Did she f*ck it up?”
Chaeyoung wants to kiss her but they’re still in the club. Secluded but not private and their lives are not their own. Still, Jihyo is worrying her bottom lip with her teeth and Chaeyoung really wants to soothe the reddened skin with her tongue.
“No,” Chaeyoung says. “She didn’t.”
Jihyo’s breath stutters and then she’s exhaling in relief so stark her whole body seems to sink down.
“She didn’t?”
Chaeyoung wants to kiss her even more. It would be the easiest way to convince her that she means it. The most straightforward way to show her that she’s still here for her, she still wants her.
“Let’s get out of here.”
It feels different now. Jihyo is softer, gentler. She takes her time undressing Chaeyoung, her mouth immediately finding the newly revealed patches of skin and once she’s made a patchwork of Chaeyoung’s skin, she pulls back to admire her work, admire Chaeyoung. It’s pure reverence in her expression. Chaeyoung feels completely exposed under it.
“You’re so beautiful,” Jihyo says, her fingers tracing down the tattoos on Chaeyoung’s arms, leaving goosebumps in their wake. “You’re so, so beautiful.”
Chaeyoung can’t stand the attention anymore and moves to distract Jihyo by ridding her of her dress as well.
“Wait, wait,” Jihyo says, catching Chaeyoung’s hands in hers. “I need you to know, before we do this, I need you to know that I’m serious about you, about this.”
Chaeyoung doesn’t doubt it. Can’t doubt it because Jihyo’s eyes are expressive as always. Maybe she’s the best damn actress on the planet but Chaeyoung knows better. Knows that not even Meryl Streep could manage this much feeling with just a look.
“I know,” Chaeyoung whispers.
Jihyo smiles but it’s not a happy smile and she doesn’t release Chaeyoung’s hands.
“Please don’t run away again,” Jihyo whispers. “I really don’t think I could take it.”
Chaeyoung gently pulls her hands from Jihyo’s grip and wraps them around her waist, pulling her so that she can rest her head against Jihyo’s chest. Jihyo’s arms wrap around her shoulders, and they sit there, just hugging until Chaeyoung’s racing heart has calmed a little and she can hear Jihyo’s beating at an even tempo.
“I won’t,” Chaeyoung says. “I won’t run. I promise.”
“I love you,” Jihyo whispers, her grip on Chaeyoung’s shoulders tightening as if she’s afraid Chaeyoung will run. “I never told you I did but I do still, even after everything.”
Chaeyoung pulls away only far enough that she can look at Jihyo. The weight of those words might have terrified her in the past, but she realizes as Jihyo says them that they’re just words. Just words to describe a feeling that Chaeyoung already knows. She has seen it in Jihyo’s eyes, felt it in her touch, heard it in her words and tone. They should scare her, but it turns out they’re nothing new.
Jihyo leans down to kiss her, seemingly not caring for or needing a response and Chaeyoung lets her. She wonders if Jihyo can feel it from her too. When Chaeyoung kisses her, can she feel how every minute they’re together brightens Chaeyoung’s life to the point she can’t image darkness anymore? Can she tell that her touch manages to both rile and soothe her at the same time? Can she hear it the way Chaeyoung says her name, like the answering of a prayer? She wonders if Jihyo can feel that she’s loved.
She could just leave it at that, and trust that Jihyo can feel it, but she knows what it’s like to doubt. So she pulls away, just slightly, arms still tight around Jihyo’s waist.
“I love you.”
Jihyo already knows. There’s no surprise or doubt or shock. Her smile is just understanding. Chaeyoung feels a relief that maybe they’re finally on the same page. When Chaeyoung kisses her again, it feels like puzzle pieces coming together. She lets herself drown in the feeling.
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