Page 140

“Does that surprise you?” I asked, picking at the remains of my pastry.

“No,” he said, and then, “Yes,” he laughed. “I wanted it, but I did not want you to feel like you had to make this decision. I wanted you to take as long as you needed.”

“I know,” I said, nodding. “But we’ve been sneaking around for weeks, and I’m… I’m kind of sick of it,” I admitted. “We did that before, and it didn’t do us any good.” I fell silent for a moment, trying to put into words what I’d been feeling for a while now. “I feel like I’ve been constantly moving from one place to the next. I haven’t felt settled anywhere for long enough to call it home, and I think I just never wanted to admit to myself that I’d only really felt at home in one place.”

“Korea?” he asked, tilting his head.

“No,” I said, smiling as he frowned. “You, Joon. At first, I thought it was Korea. But when I was back in Seoul before the tour started, I realised that while I enjoyed the city, it didn’t feel like home. It had only felt like a home with you in it. I’d felt the same when we’d stayed in that villa in West Hollywood. I hadn’t realised it at the time, but that’s what it was.”

“Me?”

“Hmm. It’s more like, ‘us’,” I said after a moment.

“Us,” he echoed, swallowing, and blinking furiously.

“Us,” I said softly.

“So, Korea? LA? The UK?” he asked, and I laughed.

“I don’t know yet,” I admitted.

“Okay, then we will figure it out.” He grinned at me, and I smiled back at him, but then his smile dimmed, and his fingers slid across the table to brush across mine. “What do you want to do about going public? Do you want to do that? We do not have to,” he said gently.

“What do you want?” I asked curiously, winding my fingers with his.

Jihoon blew out a tired breath. “I do not think I would ever want to share you with the world,” he said honestly. “Your safety scares me. More than anything.” His hold on my hand tightened for a moment before he relaxed. “But I will not hide you again. Not if you do not want it.”

I bit my lip as I frowned, watching the way his fingers traced over mine. “I won’t lie and say the thought of it doesn’t terrify me, and I know it won’t solve anything, not really. In fact, it’ll probably bring its own set of unique problems,” I scoffed. “But I do know that it sucked pretending that I didn’t exist to you.”

“It sucked pretending you didn’t exist to me,” he said roughly.

I blew out a trembling breath. “Okay then. So how do we do this?”

“We can issue a statement,” he offered. “Or, maybe, we just walk down the street together, holding hands.” He winked at me, and I laughed.

“I like that one. But maybe we wait until after the tour. I really don’t want to make this about us. And I kind of like having you to myself. Just for a little while. The world can wait.”

“The world can wait,” he agreed, squeezing my hand. And even though my heart raced, for a moment I believed it could be as simple as that.

Over the course of the morning, Joon and I loosely planned out what we wanted to do for the next two days before leaving Poland, and tentatively the things we wanted to do in the two week break before Dubai. I wanted to go back to Oakland to see Becka, which Jihoon was ambivalent about, but agreed to go along with it, so long as she stopped calling him ‘idol’. We both wanted to spend more time in Korea. He had some very grand ideas about showing me all the things we’d missed the first time round. I’d had to swallow down the lump in my throat, because it would be a while until I made peace with the period in our lives that was stolen from us.

“It’ll give me a chance to give your luggage back,” I said innocently, taking a sip of orange juice.

“My what?” He frowned.

I’d had to remind him of the designer luggage he’d ‘lent’ me when I’d left Korea, because I’d accumulated too much stuff to fit in my own bags.

“I brought it on tour with me.”

Jihoon laughed. “Did you really?”

I’d had to confess that my motivation had fallen somewhere between the idea that I’d give it back to him, at some point, and some sort of self-destructive need to see if he’d notice. If he’d remember.

“Jagiya,” he said softly. “I would not have recognised it. I only ever see you, not the things around you.”

Throughout the course of the conversation, we’d seriously considered sacking off all our plans and going to Bali. Just turn our phones off and lock ourselves away in a beach-side villa. The plan had merit, although none of it had been realistic.

The one thing all our plans had in common was that through it all, the future seemed to stretch out in front of us. And it felt like hope.