“I appreciate that,” he admitted, even if they both knew it would probably have completely changed everything for the band, for himself and Bomseok.
That the industry was cruel was already a given, but the depth of that cruelty had literally taken the lives of good people. Idols and actors his age who saw no other choice but to take their own lives because the industry took their choices away from them. People he’d known and worked with, reduced to aheadline because how dare they need support! When the actors (usually male) who committed literal crimes got only a little slap on the wrist and, after a teary press conference, were allowed to continue business as usual.
It terrified them both at first, and it had not been the greatest place to start a relationship. But it happened anyway. It had grown and run its course to the point that he could say it out loud to Lia and not feel like the world was going to crash around him. Siwan and Soobin knew too, as did their managers. But Cal felt no rush in telling the rest of the world, mostly because he wasn’t ready to.
God, he’d been in this industry way too long.
“That’s not what Siwan and Soobin were saying at the restaurant though,” Lia pointed out, keen as ever. Cal laughed, because he realized that he hadn’t planned to come here and…come out to her. But he did know he felt better for having done it.
“So youdoknow Korean.” He realized.
“I don’t, I swear,” Lia promised, shaking her head. “But I heard ‘fan’, ‘album’ and ‘??’.”
“You didn’t get ‘??,’ but you get ‘??.’” Because perilla leaves was certainly the harder vocabulary term than “cool!”
“I prioritized food for my vocabulary.” She giggled. “I imagine that’s what foreigners hear when they hear us Manila people speak Taglish.”
“?? ??.” Cal shrugged, launching himself forward, then back on the swing. “All the languages in my head are making halo halo na.”
Lia laughed and let him swing a little bit more. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on a swing, and it was no easy feat to keep himself steady, what with his long legs and all.
“Huy, Cal,” she said, and Cal slowed down to face her. The nearby streetlight was just bright enough that he could see the way her eyes softened. “Before we completely change the subject. Thank you for telling me about Bomseok. I know it’s not the same, at all, but…it’s nice. Knowing that someone else understands how hard it is, to be left behind. To leave. Tomiss someone who felt like they knew you. Especially when that person was so important to you before.”
“Just growing up things.” Cal smiled wanly at her, and she nodded like she knew exactly what he meant. And he didn’t doubt that. He reached over to squeeze her hand for a second, putting in it all his gratitude and love, all the words he didn’t have. She squeezed it back, and he felt his world shrink into this moment, to just them on these swings with nothing else.
Cal watched her for a moment, enjoying the moment where she freely let herself be swung up, then back. The unguarded smile on her face made him hope it was because she felt she could be unguarded around him, too.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he said finally. “About me being your ex-bias. About me singing about things like ‘forever’ and love, but feeling like all the things I’ve ever loved are too fragile and breakable for me.”
Lia’s feet scampered on the ground next to him as she slowed herself down, and he could almost see the lecture on her lips, even in the terrible lighting of the park. He could see her in general shapes—her scrunched nose, her glasses, her eyes and her pouted lip—but Cal felt like there was nothing else clearer to him than knowing she was going to tell him how wrong he was. How he deserved to love things, how it wasn’t so breakable.
But she could use those lessons, too. What a pair they made.
“When Bomseok asked me to move to Canada with him, I almost said yes,” he said, and that he was sure he’d never told anyone. “It was so tempting. I’d just come out of the military, then the pandemic.”
“I remember.”
“And here was the man I loved asking me to run away with him to a place where it was okay for me to be myself.”
“Why didn’t you?” Lia asked. She’d stopped swinging now, her nose still buried in his scarf. “I would have. Bomseok is very sexy.”
That made him laugh. She hadnoidea. “Let me guess. He was your ex?—”
“—bias wrecker, correct.” She nodded. “It was the hands!”
“I have nice hands,” he argued, holding them up in the dim light.
“And pretty eyes.”
“So do I.” He was deliberately blinking rapidly at Lia now, and they both laughed at how stupid they were both being.
“I always felt like it meant more to you, though,” she told him. “You wanted so many things for CoBOLT, even when we were younger.”
“I did.” He wanted things that had yet come to pass, things that felt even more out of reach now than before. He could make a list of them right now and talk in depth about how impossible any of it seemed. “I still do. It’s delusional.”
“Delusion can get you pretty far.” Lia pointed out. Touché.
“But when he left, and we were on hiatus, I tried. I tried to make music the way I always used to, and it just didn’t feel right. It tanked, and rightfully so. It felt like I’d lost the magic that I had when I was younger. And I was just doing things because I wanted tofeelsomething. Or feel like I was still working for a dream. I thought I needed him to do this. That I’m bad at this.”
