“You even lied about your name,Min.”
He stares at the floor. “Technically not, as Min is my stage name.”
“You know what? You can have your technicality because I have a fine collection of your other lies to choose from. You’re a singer. A famous one, according to Alex.”
He looks trapped but nods slowly. “Yes. An idol with StarLune.”
Idol. It blows my mind that’s even a real job title, but professionalnomenclature is not the apex issue of my problem pyramid. “Kit and Daehyun aren’t buddies here on a work trip. They’re your world-famous celebrity bandmates.”
He struggles with that for a moment before admitting defeat. “They are.”
“What else didn’t you tell me?” I sag against the desk. “You fed me such a monumental pile of bull. I guess you wanted to know what it was like to be a regular person for once. A good joke.”
“No!” He reaches out but freezes when I lean back, shaking my head. “Never, Ari. I swear I wanted to tell you.”
“How convenient now that you’ve been caught.” I try to pull back the bitterness in my voice, but I can’t.
Jihoon—Min…whoever the hell he is—passes a hand over his face. “It’s like when you don’t know someone’s name and then too much time passes to ask.”
“Those are not close to being comparable experiences. You could have told me at any time in the past month. You could have told meyesterday.”
“What, while we were making coffee after dinner? Just, ‘Yah, Ari, this slipped my memory, but I’m actually an idol. The men in the living room are members of my band. Pass the sugar.’”
I’m already on a new thought, because unlike my focused and linear work self, this self is leaping all over the place. “How about when we were watching the video you were in?” I groan. “How could I have not recognized you?”
“I have a very different presence when performing, and we had creative styling,” he says primly. “Also you were mostly looking at Kit.”
That’s undeniable, but I can’t even go there right now. “Youliedto me.”
“I know.” He looks me in the eyes. “Every time I tried, the words choked me. I knew you would be angry. I wanted to keep you safe, too.”
“Safe?”
Jihoon sits down on the chair, a calming gray tweed woven through with delicate red threads. “It’s hard for idols to date. Some fans get upset, and it’s a struggle to keep a partner’s identity private. There’s a lot of pressure and scrutiny that I wanted to avoid for you.”
I gloss over the part where he considered us either dating or about to date because that’s a whole other conversation. “It should be my choice to make.”
“No.”
My eyelashes tangle together with how hard I squint at him. “What did you say?”
“How can you make a choice not knowing the facts?” He rubs the back of his neck. “I can tell you what it’s like, but that’s nothing compared to the experience of always being watched.”
“You’re conflating telling me and telling the world,” I snap. “It’s not like I would say anything.”
The silence lasts a beat too long.
“Whoa,” I breathe. “You thought I was going to rat you out. That’s why you were so standoffish when you arrived. I thought you wereshy.” How dense am I?
“No, no! Hana trusts you, and I only wanted to get to know you first. As Jihoon, not Min of StarLune.” He looks at me piteously. “I was going to tell you tonight, I swear I was.”
“Noble of you.” I’m allowed to be snippy. It hurts that he played me for a fool, but Huis don’t do feelings talk, and I’m not about to break the family tradition. Time to focus on cold, hard plans. “What’s going to happen now?”
He seems relieved to get onto solid facts, which is probably an indication of how stressed he is. “Newlight has teams monitoring coverage,” he says. “Alex is checking every place we’ve been together in Toronto and having them sign NDAs.”
This will be part of my job when I start with Hyphen, but the irony doesn’t make me smile. “You didn’t get recognized for a month.”
“I was very careful, and no one knew I was away from Seoul at first. It was bad luck I knocked my hat off in the store.”
