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“Jagiya,” he said calmly, pulling my hands away from my hair and into his lap. “I will talk to them. I promise; they will not hate you.”

“But the group–”

“Will survive,” he said soothingly. “It was you that told me to trust our fans, do you remember? Do you suddenly think that’s not true?”

“No,” I said hesitantly, “but–”

“Some will hate us,” he agreed. “But people hate us for smaller reasons than love. There will always be something to criticise us for. Comebacks, sponsorship deals, collaborations, mis-translations. There is always something.”

“How can you be so calm about this?” I asked in a trembling voice. Because when the impact was just us, it felt easier to swallow. Now that I’d put GVibes in the firing line, I felt like a monster.

“Because I do not care if someone hates me, or us, because of who I love,” he said firmly. “If a fan chooses to stop liking us because of that, then that is their choice.”

“You sound so confident,” I said, allowing him to pull me back into his arms.

“Jagiya, I had to live without you once because I did not choose you. After that? Nothing scares me.”

We spent the rest of the evening talking, and making plans, because plans needed to happen. The world was no longer content to ignore us, so we couldn’t ignore the world.

I helped Jihoon shed his designer clothes, unpinning his carefully constructed image layer by layer, until it was just us, sitting on the bed, eating room service and deciding how we wanted our future to go from here.

Because we did have a future. Of that, I was certain.

The world could say what it wanted. I was still choosing him.

Come what may.

In the morning we were on a plane back to Korea.

Chapter 49

We could almost pretend everything was normal on the plane back to Busan. Our phones were switched off for the duration and we watched movies and ate snacks for the whole ride, or slept. Mostly we stayed connected in a way we’d rarely been free to do. Neither of us cared that his manager and the security team saw us holding hands, or the way he pressed a kiss to my temple. If we were standing in the fire, we’d stand in it together.

It was just us on the plane. For optics, Lee was staying in Paris for another day, as per his schedule. No one needed to say it was to create distance from Joon and me. It made sense to protect the other members from any associated fallout. Jihoon had spoken to Lee this morning and explained. I hadn’t seen him, but Jihoon said he’d understood, and that he wasn’t mad at us. I hadn’t expected him to be, not really, but hearing that had been a relief, all the same.

Jihoon had also spoken with ENT again. He’d relayed our decision to them, making it clear that we weren’t going to deny anything, but that we also weren’t going to confirm anything right now, either. The company had apparently been quite supportive of the idea that we say nothing until after the tour.

ENT had already responded – sort of. I’d known they wouldn’t put out a public response because that would imply this was something they as a company needed to respond to, which communicated the idea that the private lives of their artists were something they controlled, or wanted to control. Even the idea of a ‘dating ban’ was so controversial, I knew ENT would avoid any appearance of it.

What they had done instead was reply to an email.

A simple request from a news outlet to their PR department requesting a statement. Perfectly standard, and not to be confused with issuing a public statement.

It is not our policy to respond on behalf of our artists in respect of their personal lives. Those images were published without consent, depict private romantic interactions, and were aggregated and distributed in a way designed to cause distress and reputational harm.

No further comment will be issued by ENT.

Naturally, the news outlet had published the response. As ENT had known they would. It was all part of the circus, and I could begrudgingly admire it.

We arrived in Busan just after two am. It was cold and raining, and we hurried towards the car waiting for us outside the terminal. There was no question that we would be staying together this time.

We almost made it.

The car waited at the pavement, engine running, a member of the security team standing beside it, ready to open the door.

“Baek Jihoon!” someone called, and in the pre-dawn stillness it broke through the air like a lightning strike.

Jihoon flinched, but I turned instinctively, trying to see past the wall of people bracketing us.