His phone screen glowed in the dark of his dorm room, the text thread a lifeline. Practice had bled into night, a blur of choreography and vocal runs that usually left his mind buzzing with a relentless, creative static. But the moment his body stilled, the current changed direction. It always did. It streamed across the ocean, zeroing in on a specific apartment in California. He’d texted her, the words simple. *Practice just ended. Can I call?* Her reply was instant, and so her. *Only if you aren’t supposed to be sleeping.* No admissions. Just Kelsey.
The video connected. Her face filled his laptop screen, lit by the warm lamplight of her living room. Her smile was immediate, bright enough to make him blink. She looked happy. Rested. She looked at him like she used to—direct, unguarded, like she was seeing *him*, not Han of Stray Kids. The tight coil of tension in his shoulders, the one he carried like a second spine, loosened a fraction.
“You look dead,” she said, her voice crisp through his headphones. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be sleeping?”
“I’m sure.” His own voice was rough with fatigue. He leaned back against his headboard, the room around him a cave of shadows and the faint smell of clean laundry. “My brain doesn’t shut off until I talk to you. It’s a thing.”
She rolled her eyes, but the smile stayed. “A weird thing. But okay. How was the murderous practice?”
He gave her the abbreviated version—the missed step, the producer’s note, Changbin’s terrible joke that lightened the mood. As he spoke, he watched her. She was curled on her couch, a blanket over her legs, nodding along. She got it. She always had. She understood the language of his life, even when he couldn’t translate it all. The silence that followed his summary wasn’t empty. It was the easy, shared quiet they used to have in her car, the music playing too loud between them.
He broke it. He couldn’t help himself. The question had been sitting in his chest since their last, strained call. “So. Any more dates with ancient swim coaches?” He kept his tone light, teasing. It was an art form.
Kelsey groaned, throwing her head back against the cushions. “Oh my god. Don’t even start. That was a disaster. He spent forty minutes talking about his personal best butterfly stroke. I don’t even know what that means.”
“It’s a stroke. In swimming.”
“I know that, dummy.” She shot him a look. “I mean, who does that? Anyway, that was the last of him. And the guy before that, the film student, only wanted to talk about the ‘aesthetic of urban decay.’ And the one before *that* asked if I could get him backstage passes to a show.” She flung her hands up. “They’re all terrible. Every single one.”
A part of him, a dark, possessive part he tried to keep caged, uncoiled with a vicious satisfaction. He smothered it. “You’re a cute cheerleader in California, Kels. Of course you’re going on dates.” The words tasted like ash. “The odds are in your favor. Statistically.”
“The odds are stupid,” she grumbled, pulling the blanket up to her chin. “All the boys here are so… into themselves. They just don’t *get* me. I need someone who gets me, you know?”
Inside his head, the words were a scream. *I get you. I could be that. I am that.* The force of it locked his jaw. He could see it, a phantom life superimposed over this one: him, walking into her apartment instead of calling from twelve hours away. Him, listening to her complain about bad dates and pulling her close, his hand finding the small of her back, his mouth against her hair. *I’m right here.* But he wasn’t. He was here, in this cage of his own making, and the bars were made of ocean and time and a career he loved with a desperation that felt like a betrayal.
“You’ll find someone,” he said, the lie smooth and practiced. “Someone less into urban decay.”
“Ugh, don’t remind me.” She shifted, her face softening. “Enough about my tragic love life. How’s the song coming? The one you were stuck on?”
He let her steer them into safer waters. He talked about the melody that had finally clicked, the lyric that was still just out of reach. She listened, her head tilted, offering the occasional “that sounds cool” or “that’s kinda sad, Jisung.” She used his real name. Not Han. The performer’s shield he wore all day, every day, felt like a costume he could finally shrug off in this little blue-lit square of screen. She was good at that. The best at it. Letting him just be Jisung.
After a while, she launched into a story about her Korean class, the one he’d convinced her to take when she’d moved to LA. “It’s impossible,” she declared, her hands flying as she spoke. “Why does there have to be a whole other alphabet? That’s just rude. And the letters! They squish together. They *stack*. It’s not fair.”
He laughed, a real one that hurt his tired stomach. “It’s called Hangul. And it’s scientific. It’s brilliant.”
“It’s dumb,” she insisted, but she was smiling, her nose scrunched. “I tried to order coffee today and I pointed at the menu and said ‘*hwan-guk*’ instead of ‘*hyeong*’ and the guy looked at me like I’d grown a second head. I think I called him a Korean currency.”
“You basically did.” He was grinning now, the image of her flustered and determined clear in his mind. She was adorable. A wave of affection, so profound it was painful, washed over him. This. This was what he missed. Not just her, but the version of himself that existed only with her. The boy who laughed easily, who didn’t have to measure every word, who was known.
“You’re terrible,” he said, his voice dropping into something softer, more private.
“I’m trying!” she protested, but her eyes were bright with shared laughter. The conversation drifted again, to her classes, to his upcoming schedule, a meandering stream of nothing and everything. The digital clock in the corner of his screen ticked later. He should let her go. He should sleep.
He didn’t.
“Remember,” she said suddenly, her voice quieter. “That time in my car, junior year, after the winter formal? And we just drove out to the edge of town where you could see all the stars?”
He remembered. The desert cold, the roof down, her in her sparkly dress with his jacket over her shoulders. The silence that wasn’t silent at all, filled with the hum of the engine and a feeling so big he didn’t have a name for it. “Yeah.”
“I miss that,” she said, simple and direct. She wasn’t looking at the camera now; she was looking somewhere past it, into the memory. “I miss the drives.”
The confession hung between them, a fragile, honest thing. It mirrored his own from months ago, a call that had ended with her in tears. This time, the air didn’t tighten with unsaid words. It softened. He missed it too. He missed it with an ache that was physical. He missed the freedom of an open road and her in the passenger seat, the world reduced to just the two of them and a tank of gas.
“Me too,” he breathed. Two words, holding everything.
Her gaze found his again through the screen. She studied him, her smile gone, replaced by a quiet intensity. She was seeing all of him—the fatigue, the longing, the boy under the idol. Her lips parted as if to speak, to finally give voice to the thing that had lived between them for years.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, hopeful drum. *Say it. Please.*
But she didn’t. She let out a slow breath, and the moment passed. Her smile returned, smaller now, tinged with a sadness that mirrored his own. “You should sleep, Jisung. You really do look dead.”
The dismissal was gentle, but it was a door closing. The cage door. He nodded, the movement stiff. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Call me tomorrow? If you’re not supposed to be sleeping?”
“I will.”
“Good.” She bit her lip. “Goodnight, Han.”
She used his stage name. A deliberate distance. A reminder of the worlds that separated them. It was a tiny, precise cut. “Goodnight, Kelsey.”
The screen went dark, reflecting his own exhausted face back at him. The room was suddenly colder, quieter, the silence absolute and suffocating. He sat there in the blue glow, the ghost of her smile etched behind his eyes. She missed the drives. She needed someone who got her.
He got her. He was that someone. And he was here, alone, while the possibility of anyone else—some California boy who didn’t deserve her, who would never understand the first thing about the music in her soul or the way her hands moved when she talked—loomed in the space between their goodnights. The jealousy was no longer a sharp, sudden stab. It was a deep, cold current, pulling him under. He was drowning in silence, and the only person who could pull him out was the one he’d just let go.