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Every emotion felt too close to the surface. I felt bruised. Tender and clumsy, as if everything had just happened. It was such a close resemblance to how I’d felt so many years ago, before we’d even started dating.

Back then, I’d always felt like I was one stubbed toe away from bursting into tears. All I’d wanted was him. I couldn’t see past it.

Now it was less clear, somehow messier than the secret I’d needed to become for him, because in the here and now he’d offered to give me everything I’d ever wanted. Himself. Publicly, or – at least – not have to live as his secret. Except it had never just been about that. Not really.

We hadn’t failed just because of the secrecy, and that’s what I had to keep reminding myself of because wanting something did not mean it was good for me, and perhaps that was made especially clear in the way I hated that he was up in the hills, while I was down here. I fucking hated metaphors.

LA always had a way of making life seem a little more lax.

Perhaps it was that the first leg of the tour was officially over, or perhaps it was the American effect, but everyone on the crew seemed a little less uptight. I said as much to Sihyeon one morning as we made our way to the stadium for orientation.

“It’s the vacation effect,” she said.

“The what?”

“Vacation effect. The Asia leg is… what’s the saying?” She clicked her fingers. “Home turf. The pressure is bigger. It’s the first few performances, so the expectation is higher. But in America the need to be perfect isn’t so big.”

I didn’t know if that was universally true, but I had to concede that the feeling among the various teams was almost relaxed. The tour was a machine. It powered on as if by habit. Teams that had leap-frogged from Asia to the US merged back in seamlessly, and maybe that helped the sense of ease as they had been here in the states longer.

The group members were constantly around now. Before, they’d pretty much been shuffled from hotel to venue and back again with some scheduled sightseeing and public appearances, but we’d barely been in LA two days and already they had scattered halfway across the city in one adventure or another.

The tour took on an almost festival-like vibe, and it was contagious.

The members went Live nearly every day to document their free time – whether they were hanging out at the gym or the mansion, or taking a tour along the Walk of Fame. They were outwardly living their best lives, and even though I only saw it from a distance it was truly joyful to watch. Especially knowing how much anxiety they had gone through over the past six months. They’d been so worried about whether their fans would wait for them during their enlistment, and whether they would like the new album which represented their growth as artists.

I couldn’t imagine how it must feel to put yourself out there like that, for public consumption.

In the time since Reset had come out, and the tour had been in full swing, the world had done its part to welcome the group back with overwhelming support. It was like I was watching them collectively relax as time passed. Before, they cared about the perfection of the performance, but gradually the focus seemed to shift from delivering perfection to ensuring the audience had a great time.

It wasn’t just in these big ways that I noticed the shift.

Almost as if there had been no gap in our relationship, Ace began recruiting me into his schemes. I could have pulled back, maintained a professional distance, but how was I supposed to say no when he’d pulled up beside me one morning in a golf buggy and told me to, ‘get in, loser’. Obviously I got in immediately and we took an unscheduled tour of the venue, judiciously using the whiny little horn and doing a full circuit of the stadium until Minjae blocked the path and demanded Ace rejoin the group. I’d gone back to what I was doing, sides aching from how hard I’d laughed. Since then, it was like the curtain had dropped, and I was allowed to see behind it.

Ace regularly sought me out whenever we were in the same area. Sometimes he just jumped up to sit next to me on whichever stack of boxes I had perched myself on to eat snacks. Sometimes we talked. Sometimes Lee joined us, and the three of us found little pockets of time to just hang out.

One afternoon, a couple of days before the first concert, Woojin strolled up to me. I was sat cross-legged on the floor behind the heavy curtain that separated the main stage and backstage. I’d been watching the dancers warm up, idly wishing I had even half the control over my body they demonstrated.

Woojin crouched down next to me, looking down at my notepad. Even though the page was only filled with little notes and threads of thought, I clamped it to my chest.

“Hey! No snooping,” I chided.

He smirked and sat down a few feet away, groaning slightly.

“Does your knee hurt?” I asked, grimacing as I watched him rub his left knee. He’d had an injury during his enlistment that hadn’t been made public. He’d had surgery on it, and even though he seemed to keep up with the demanding choreography, I’d noticed him favouring his good knee from time to time.

He shrugged and turned to watch the dancers.

“Sometimes. It’s not so bad most days, but it hurts when we travel,” he answered in a mix of English and Korean. His English was far better than my Korean, but I’d noticed he preferred to switch between the two languages, and I quietly suspected it was because he didn’t feel confident enough. This man, who could rap in two languages, felt shy about his conversational English. He was definitely not as intimidating as people thought.

I made a sympathetic noise. “Even flying first class is cramped if you have to sit there for twelve hours.”

He hummed and leaned back on his hands.

Ace emerged from the long corridor that led further back into the venue, looked around and then spotted me. He waved and headed over.

“You can tell him to go away. If you want,” Woojin said offhandedly. “If he is interrupting your work.” He said this in English, possibly because Ace wasn’t as fluent.

I laughed quietly, but said, “He’s my friend.” It came out a little more serious than I intended. It felt like a line in the sand. I wanted my friend back, but more than that – I wanted to be able to be his friend.