The video call connected, and Han’s breath caught. It wasn’t the familiar, sleep-softened Kelsey he’d expected to see. The screen showed her leaning into a vanity mirror, the sharp light of her phone’s flashlight propped against it. She was applying mascara, her green eyes wide and focused, her strawberry blonde hair pulled up in a messy knot. A silky black top glimmered under the harsh light. It was midnight in Los Angeles.
“What are you doing?” The question left him before he could soften it. He was in an empty practice room, the only light coming from his own phone and the emergency exit sign over the door. The silence around him felt suddenly heavy.
She finished the stroke, blinked at her reflection, then turned her face to the camera. Her smile was quick, a little guilty. “Hey, you. I didn’t think you’d call tonight.”
“Clearly.” He tried to match her casual tone and failed. His voice was flat. “You’re putting on makeup. At midnight.”
“I’m sneaking out.” She said it like it was a normal Tuesday, picking up a lip gloss. “Tenley’s swim coach is in town for a conference. We’re meeting for a drink.”
The words landed in his stomach like stones. Tenley’s swim coach. He pictured a man in a polo shirt, broad shoulders, a patronizing smile. Someone who didn’t know she hated the taste of cilantro, or that she got a specific, crinkly-eyed laugh when she was truly, helplessly amused. Someone who hadn’t spent years earning the right to see it.
“Wait.” Han heard the tension in his own voice. He couldn’t stop it. “Isn’t he old?”
Kelsey rolled her eyes, a familiar, affectionate gesture that did nothing to calm the tightness in his chest. “He’s twenty-four, Han. It’s not a crime.”
Twenty-four. Six years older than her. The math was simple, brutal. A man. Not a boy from her high school. A man with a career, who could take her to proper bars, who didn’t have to hide from cameras or ask for permission to cross a border. A man who could be there.
“That’s six years older than you, Kels,” he said, and it came out quieter than he intended. Almost wounded.
She paused, the lip gloss hovering. Her gaze on the camera sharpened, seeing past his pixelated image to the tone he’d failed to mask. “It’s just a drink. Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“That thing where your voice gets all low and you stop blinking. It’s not a big deal.” She set the gloss down with a soft click. The sound was impossibly loud through his headphones.
He wasn’t blinking. He forced himself to, the dry air of the practice room scratching at his eyes. The admission roared inside his skull, a truth he would only speak to himself: *It is a big deal. The biggest deal. Don’t go.* He said nothing. He watched her check her hair in the mirror, a quick, practiced flip of her head. The movement was so utterly, confidently Kelsey. It carved a hollow ache under his ribs.
“Since when do you sneak out?” he asked, grasping for neutral ground. “You have your own place now.”
“It’s more fun this way,” she said, a ghost of her old, reckless grin touching her lips. “Feels like high school. Besides, my roommate’s a light sleeper and a total narc.” She leaned closer to the screen, her face filling his world. “You look tired. Long day?”
The shift was typical of her—direct, caring, disarming. It left him exposed. “The usual. Writing. Practice. More practice.” He ran a hand through his hair, the gel from earlier making it stiff. “I just… wanted to see you. It’s been a year.”
The unspoken weight of that year hung between them, across all those miles and pixels. The last time he’d seen her in person, she was standing in a driveway under a desert sky, and he’d been too much of a coward to say a single true thing.
“I know,” she said softly. Her expression softened, the pre-date excitement fading into something more intimate, more familiar. This was the Kelsey who knew him. The one he’d video-called from airport bathrooms and lonely hotel rooms. “It’s good to see you, too.”
He wanted to ask a hundred questions. *What is he like? What do you talk about? Does he make you laugh like I do?* The jealousy was a physical taste, metallic and sour at the back of his tongue. He swallowed it down. “So, UCLA cheerleader. I still can’t picture it. You doing backflips in a skirt.”
It was the wrong thing to say. It reminded them both of the distance, of the separate lives they were diligently building. Her smile became a performance. “It’s a sport. And the scholarship pays my rent. Don’t be a jerk.”
“I’m not. I think it’s cool.” He meant it. He hated it. The thought of a stadium of people watching her, of this swim coach watching her from the stands, made his skin feel too tight.
A notification chimed on her phone, lighting up the screen beside her. She glanced at it, and her whole demeanor shifted again, brightening with anticipation. “That’s him. I gotta go. My Uber’s two minutes away.”
Panic, clean and sharp, lanced through him. “Right now?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry.” She was already gathering her purse, a small black thing that looked expensive. An adult’s purse. “Call me tomorrow? Tell me about your song.”
He couldn’t let it end like this. With her rushing off to some stranger. “Kelsey.”
She paused, one earring in her hand, and looked at him. Really looked. “What, Jisung?”
The words piled up behind his teeth. *Don’t go. Stay. Talk to me. Choose me.* They were impossible words. They were the words that would break the careful, fragile world they’d rebuilt over texts and birthday calls. He saw the slight impatience in her posture, the eagerness to leave. She had a life. A life that didn’t revolve around waiting for his calls.
“Be careful,” he said finally, the lamest, most pathetic substitute for everything he meant.
Something flickered in her green eyes—disappointment, maybe. Or resignation. “I’m always careful.” She put in the other earring, a silver hoop. “Goodnight, Han.”
She used his stage name. A subtle wall. A reminder of the roles they played. Before he could reply, her smile flashed once more, a brief, bright thing, and the screen went dark.
Han sat in the silent, dark practice room. The only sound was the faint, perpetual hum of the building’s ventilation. He stared at his own reflection in the black screen of his phone—a pale face, shadowed eyes, the sharp lines of someone who worked too hard and slept too little. A stranger.
The hollow ache under his ribs had expanded into a vast, howling space. He had been so close to hopping on a plane. For weeks, the fantasy had played in his mind: surprising her after her graduation, showing up at her door with no warning, just to see that shock of joy on her face. He’d researched flights. He’d calculated the three days he could maybe, possibly steal. He’d imagined the feel of the Arizona sun, now the California sun, on his skin, and her laugh, louder than any music.
And now she was in a car, heading toward a man who could offer her a real night. A normal night. While he sat in a dark room on the other side of the world, possessive and helpless.
He stood up abruptly, his chair scraping against the polished floor. The sound echoed. He paced the length of the mirrored wall, his own fragmented movements multiplying around him. A year. A full year of missing her, of loving her in silence, of telling himself it was the noble thing, the protective thing. And for what? So some swim coach could swoop in and take the girl who had been his home?
He stopped, facing his reflection. The truth was no longer a quiet, private realization in a dark bedroom. It was a scream. He didn’t want to share her. He couldn’t. The thought of her smiling at another man, leaning in to hear him over music, letting him touch the small of her back—it ignited a fury in him that was pure and terrifying.
“Just friends,” he said aloud to his reflection, the words bitter and hollow in the empty room. It was the lie they’d built their world on. It was the lie that was going to lose her.
The jealousy wasn’t a sharp edge anymore; it was the entire atmosphere, thick and suffocating. He had spent so long being careful, being smart, being an idol. He had let the best part of himself drive away in a blue convertible, and he had spent every day since then slowly starving.
He picked up his phone again, his thumb hovering over her name. He could call her back. He could tell her. The impulse was a live wire, buzzing with dangerous potential.
He didn’t call. He slid the phone into his pocket. The admission remained where it had always been: locked in the silent, jealous chambers of his own heart. But the lock was straining. The door was bending. He stood in the darkness, and for the first time, he allowed himself to truly envision what it would cost to keep lying. And what it might cost to finally stop.