“Me?” Siwan asked.
“No, her.” Cal pointed at Lia with pursed lips and Lia blinked back at him with a ssam already in her mouth.
“Me?”
“You.” Cal nodded. Dongyeon looked up at him as if to ask what was happening, and Cal nudged his head in the direction of the door, a signal that he wasn’t going far. “Let’s talk outside.”
The autumn nightwas warm as Cal and Lia headed outside together. Lia pulled her jacket closer around her body as the wind whipped at them. Cal tipped his baseball cap lower over his eyes and pressed his scarf closer to his mouth.
“Where are we going?” She asked him, squinting from behind her glasses.
“Uh—over there.” Cal nudged his head in the direction of a children’s park that was conveniently one street crossing away. Neither of them really spoke as they walked. Cal was unsurewhat was going through Lia’s head, and he was wondering how the hell he was going to tell her this. He was never great at details, he was always a big picture, broad strokes kind of guy. But sometimes you had to put on your big boy pants and get through it.
The park was surrounded by a perimeter of trees, the leaves all in darkened shades of orange and yellow, swaying gently in the cool night breeze. The leaves crunched under their feet as they walked, and it felt like the kind of night that could stretch into forever. Like you never wanted it to end.
They reached the swing set, and Cal smiled when he noticed the bounce in Lia’s step as she sat on one of the swings, rocking forward, backward, forward.
“I listened toBlue Springsagain,” Lia announced suddenly, giving him the name of the band’s last album before the hiatus, their first after military service, the last that had Bomseok. “It sounds so different from the band’s first songs. I think I didn’t really understand how much you were hurting in that music until now.”
“I was surprised the company let us release that,” Cal admitted. “I was all angry and resentful. It was the middle of the pandemic, and I knew our music couldn’t beBolt of Blueforever. We needed to grow, we needed to change. And I thought an album about toxic love was the right way to go.”
“But you didn’t recognize yourself after,” Lia said, her gaze seemingly far, far away. Cal moved to her and waited for her nod before he stepped closer. She shivered.
He held the chains of the swing so she wouldn’t kick him in the face, then crouched down so he could pull his scarf from his neck to place around hers. Her fingertips were cold, so he crouched down in front of her and rubbed her palms with his, blowing gently.
“That’s…not very pandemic-friendly,” Lia said suddenly, and Cal paused his ministrations, because he just realized what he was doing, how close he was. Suddenly, he could smell her perfume, something green and fresh, could see the stitches on her jacket, the individual strands of yarn on his scarf. His breath caught in his chest, and he looked up. Just enough to see her eyes, clearer than anything. Just enough for his palms to sweat and his nerves to get the better of him. Him, the lead singer of a band.
“Oh,” he said, letting her go. “Sorry, I don’t?—”
“It’s okay, I have sanitizer in the restaurant, I didn’t?—”
“But the scarf, did it?—?”
She touched the scarf, burying her nose under it as she kind of nuzzled into the fabric. Cal wondered if there was such a thing as an indirect neck nuzzle, because he could feel it on his skin, a prickling warmth he wished was real.
“You wanted to tell me something,” Lia reminded him, all serious. Cal took the empty swing next to her, suddenly all out of courage, but so full of willingness that he didn’t know what to say. “We’re friends, right? You can tell me anything.”
Right. Theywerefriends. And he wanted her to know how much it meant to him that she was here, that they had become friends.
“I wrote those songs because I was trying to get rid of everything Bomseok liked about me. He didn’t get to have CoBOLT Cal, Leader Cal. Not after we broke up.”
Why did he start there?
“Oh.” Lia blinked, and clearly, she hadn’t expected him to say that. To be fair, Cal hadn’t expected to either. But in his minimal experience with this, coming out was best done when you felt it was right, when you felt safe enough to say it out loud. “You were together. Like really together.”
He laughed bitterly, because it felt inadequate to describe the mass that Ji Bomseok had occupied in his being, and the parts of Cal that he’d taken away when he left. “Five years. He was my first for a lot of things, helped me come to terms with being bisexual, and for the longest time I…I didn’t feel so lonely, being the leader of the band, because he was with me.”
The tightness in his chest eased as he said it, and it was mostly because he hadn’t said that to anyone out loud, ever. The correct, media-training agency-approved thing to say was that Bomseok had been integral to CoBOLT and their image, their music. But it was more accurate to say that Bomseok had done all that so Cal could be himself.
“You loved him.”
“I did.” He nodded. “Not enough, I suppose.”
“You miss him?”
Cal shrugged. “I miss him like I miss weekday anime, or the calamansi juice they used to sell at the school canteen. Things that I can’t get back.” Cal had already given up that chance. He didn’t regret it, choosing this over what Bomseok was offering—a different life, somewhere else together, but without music. But what did they have, Cal had wondered, without music? “I’ve accepted that we had to go our own ways. He’s much happier now, I think. Based on what Soobin told me.”
“I’m sorry it didn’t work out. And that you had to hide it,” Lia said. “It would have been great, seeing you guys happy together.”
