My fingers stilled.
The song? The photos? The ones he’d posted on his social media? I hadn’t allowed myself consider if that had been for my benefit, but I’d always…
I lurched to my feet while Jihoon watched me. Warily, like I might lash out, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I was spent. I felt like I’d been carved out and tipped upside down.
Everything I thought I knew, assumptions I’d made, conclusions I’d drawn, the ways in which I’d redrawn the lines and tortured myself for three years.
A facade – three years of a story I’d told myself was built on lies.
I needed to create space between us.
My past and my present were colliding, and it felt like too much. I paced, shaking out my hands to loosen the tight muscles.
For a moment, all I could hear was the blood rushing in my ears, tidal waves pounding a thrumming beat that drowned out everything else.
Every lie, every story I’d told myself to make it make sense. Every way I’d blamed myself.
The initial agony, and the months that had followed. The way I’d tried to rebuild my life afterwards.
Slowly, Jihoon got to his feet. His movements seemed exaggerated, cautious. He reached for me. His fingers brushed against my arms, and I could feel how badly he was shaking, but maybe that was me. Two earthquakes joining together to shake the whole world.
His touch stopped my racing mind, calmed the unsettled thrum that shivered through me, but despite it, I couldn’t focus on any one thing, going from one piece of information to another, alighting on it briefly.
Until –
Like a woollen thread snagging on a splinter of wood, my thoughts caught on something, rebounded and hit me in the gut.
“What about Lee Hyejin?” I said with such clarity you’d have thought I was at least in the right vicinity of my mind, instead of spiralling somewhere above it.
He’d very publicly dated her after we’d broken up. The one thing he wouldn’t do with me.
If what he was saying was true, how did he justify being with her, knowing how he felt about me? Was she some sort of rebound?
“Fake,” he blurted out
My mind screeched to a halt, caught on that one word.
“Fake?” I asked, raising a shaking hand to my forehead.
He nodded, emphatically. “It was–” he paused, searching for the word.
The mannerism he had of twirling his hand in the air, as though trying to snatch the word from it, was as familiar to me as my own reflection. It elicited a sense of déjà vu.
“Orchestrated,” he settled on, saying the word carefully in the way he still did to push down his natural Busansatooriwhich was so much more prevalent when he was anxious.
“The company, they wanted us to date in public.”
I frowned. “Why?” But what I actually wanted to ask was if he’d really loved her, or had that been fake, aswell? I bit down the question.
Jihoon looked away, taking a deep breath as he let go of me. He took a step back, and shoved his hands into his pockets.
A strangely compartmentalised section of my brain couldn’t help but see how rumpled he was in that suit. It looked like he hadn’t slept in days.
“Lee Hyejin had been getting a lot of threats. Death threats. The company was concerned.”
“Because of the dinner photos?” I guessed, although it hadn’t started there, I recalled with unsettling clarity.
She’d been getting attacked for months because some fans assumed she was in a secret relationship with Jihoon, and hated her for it.
