The mirrored practice room was hot and close, smelling of sweat and polished wood. The only sound was their ragged breathing and the soft thump of a bass track Chan was still fine-tuning in the corner. Han wiped his forearm across his brow, his phone still warm in his pocket from the call he’d ended minutes ago. A year and six months since he’d seen her last. He’d missed the chaos of a normal family. Her mom’s voice asking about his meals. The way her brother Kohl shouted questions from another room. But mostly, he missed her. The way she made him feel like Jisung, not Han.
“So,” Changbin drawled, collapsing onto the floor beside him with a grin that promised trouble. “Was that the girl I saw you stalking on Instagram last week?”
Han kept his eyes on the ceiling. “I wasn’t stalking.”
Which meant yes, absolutely he was. He’d clicked through a dozen photos her sister had tagged her in, all taken in the Arizona sun. Kelsey laughing, head thrown back. Kelsey squinting at the camera, holding up a peace sign. A quiet ache had settled in his chest, sharp and familiar.
“She sounds pretty,” Felix chimed in from across the room, his voice light and teasing. “When we go to LA in a couple months, will she be there?”
Han sat up, shrugging. The motion felt stiff. “I haven’t asked.”
“You should,” Hyunjin said, not looking up from where he was retying his shoe. “We’d like to meet her.”
“I can ask her,” Han said, the words automatic. A polite deflection. He hadn’t shown anyone a picture of her since Hyunjin had snuck into his phone months ago, holding it up with a triumphant shout. He’d kindly blown them off every time since. But they knew. They knew she was the girl from Arizona. The one that felt like home in a place that was very much not home.
Lee Know raised an eyebrow from where he was stretching. “You say that like you think she’ll say no.”
“It’s not like that,” Han said, too quickly. He stood up, walking toward his water bottle just to have something to do. The floor vibrated faintly with Chan’s bassline. “We’re just friends. She’s busy. She’s in school.”
“Just friends,” Changbin echoed, the tease gone from his voice, replaced by something closer to curiosity. “The kind of just friends you video call from your childhood bedroom?”
Han took a long drink. The water was lukewarm. He could feel their eyes on him—not malicious, but relentlessly observant. They lived in each other’s pockets. They saw everything. He’d heard her mother’s voice through his headphones. Heard Jenny say his name. For a moment, in that sun-drenched living room three thousand miles away, he hadn’t been an idol. He’d been Jisung, the exchange student who ate too many of her cookies.
“She’s important,” he said finally, the admission quiet in the humid room. “That’s all.”
“Important enough that you looked like you wanted to murder that swim coach guy she mentioned?” Seungmin asked, ever the blunt one.
A flash of heat, sudden and violent, shot through Han’s veins. He hadn’t realized his reaction had been that transparent. He’d been sitting in a dark practice room, his knuckles white around his phone, listening to her describe a man he would never meet. The jealousy had been a physical thing, a sour taste in his mouth. He forced his jaw to unclench.
“That was different,” he muttered.
“Sure,” Felix sang, smiling. “So, can we see a picture? Just one. Since we’re going to meet her soon anyway.”
Han’s thumb hovered over the power button on his phone. Showing them felt like exposing a nerve. Kelsey was his. Not in the way they were thinking, but in a deeper, more fundamental way. She was the keeper of the before. The witness to the person he was when the cameras weren’t rolling. Letting them look felt like letting them into a part of his soul he’d kept carefully boxed away, separate from this life.
But the pressure of their expectant silence was a tangible weight. Chan was still hunched over his laptop, lost in the track, the only one offering no opinion. The rest were waiting.
With a sigh that was more surrender than he wanted it to be, Han unlocked his phone. He scrolled past schedules, past group chats, past a hundred selfies, until he found it. A picture from years ago, one she’d sent him during his first lonely winter in Seoul. She was sitting on the hood of her blue convertible, the Arizona sky a brilliant orange behind her. She was wearing his old hoodie, the one he’d left behind, the sleeves swallowing her hands. She was smiling at the camera, and the smile was pure, unguarded Kelsey—a little mischievous, wholly warm.
He turned the screen toward them.
For a second, no one spoke. They just looked.
“Wow,” Felix said, his teasing tone softened into something genuine. “She’s really…”
“She looks like sunshine,” Hyunjin finished, uncharacteristically quiet.
Changbin whistled low. “Just friends, huh?”
Han snatched the phone back, the screen going dark. “Yes.”
The word echoed in the room, hollow and false even to his own ears. He’d said it to her mother, by omission. He’d said it to his bandmate who’d called her his girlfriend. He said it constantly, a mantra to keep the world—and himself—at bay. Just friends. Just friends. Just friends.
But the truth was a living thing, coiled tight in his gut. He missed the chaos of her family because it was his chaos, too. He missed her mom’s scolding and her brother’s loud questions because they were pieces of a life where he was just a boy. He missed her because with her, the performance ended. The constant calculation of angles and reactions and personas fell away. She was the only person who never asked for Han. She only ever asked for Jisung.
And the thought of sharing that—of sharing her—with anyone else, even his brothers, made something primal and possessive tighten in his chest. The idea of them meeting her in LA, of seeing her smile directed at them, of hearing her laugh because of something they said… it made his hands curl into fists.
Chan finally looked up from his laptop, sensing the shift in the room. His leader’s gaze was knowing, too perceptive. “You okay, Jisung?”
Han nodded, unable to speak. He was not okay. He was unmoored. The carefully maintained distance between his two worlds had just collapsed. Her voice was in his headphones, her family’s love was in his ears, and her picture was in his bandmates’ minds. She was everywhere.
And he was here, in a sweaty practice room, realizing with a slow, dawning horror that “just friends” was the biggest lie he’d ever told. It was a lie that had allowed him to keep her. And it was a lie that was now, very clearly, going to cost him everything.