I stopped moving, maybe even stopped breathing, for a few moments.
“Tae,” I said, not a question.
“Yeah, honey, how are you?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You started it, sweetcheeks.
“I did no– ” I took a breath. “You know what, never mind. What do you want, Tae?”
“I wanted to see if you were doing okay.” His voice had lost the edge of laughter it always seemed to resonate with, but the warmth was still there.
“What? Why wouldn’t I be?”
A pause.
“Well,” he hesitated. “What with the photos and all…”
“It really doesn’t effect me,” I bit out, rubbing my tender knee.
“Right. Sure. Yeah, it’s just… it does, though. Doesn’t it?”
“Tae,” I sighed. “Don’t take this the wrong way–”
“Too late,” he said cheerfully.
“–but what do you need?”
“Damn, Pom, you’re hard work, you know?”
“So I’ve been told,” I grumbled.
Tae sighed, and I felt like I could see him dragging a hand through his hair.
“Look, I know what people think of me. I know they reckon I’m this one-a-night playboy, and while that rep has it’s uses, do you know how fucking hard it is to make friends with someone who doesn’t just want something from you? Most people, they only want the the performer. Sometimes they want the playboy. They’re not interested in who we actually are, only who they think we are.”
Without warning, my mind flashed back to another time, on a beach more than five thousand miles away.
“Sometimes it’s hard to know who wants to know you and who wants to know the idol.”
“Hell, Pom. You don’t seem to want any variation of me.” He laughed, and once again I found my lips inadvertently quirking upwards.
“And yet, here you are.” I quipped.
He sighed again. “Here I am.” He was quiet for a moment. “Look, I know this is probably a little weird. I just sorta felt like we were similar, you know?”
“In what way?” I asked curiously.
“Two commonwealth kids in a foreign land, struggling to fit in.”
I made an unladylike sound.
“You fit in there far more than I ever did,” I said wryly, rolling my jeans up to inspect the damage. Barely a bruise.
“Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it,” he said so quietly that I wondered if he’d meant me to hear.
I couldn’t explain it, but something about the way he sounded made me feel sad for him. Maybe it was the loneliness. I recognised it, because outside of Joon, I had been lonely in Korea. In a way, that had made sense, because who the hell was I? Just some intern who barely spoke the language. But Tae? He was the last person who should be lonely. It softened me towards him. It didn’t make sense. I barely knew the guy. He seemed nice enough, certainly willing to make friends, but willingness did not create a shared history. Willingness did not make us friends.
