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“I believe people understand emotions, and the intention behind a song, regardless of the language. When we write a song, we are conscious of our audience, because we have so many all over the world that Korean, or English lyrics would still alienate so many, so we want to find a way to make a song understandable.” He gestured with his hand as he spoke, as if he was trying to convey meaning alongside his words, and I found myself watching the way his fingers wove through the air on invisible currents. The movement was as familiar to me as the sound of his voice. “Some emotions do not need translating. Love. Loneliness. The need to be understood. People understand emotion, even if they do not understand the words.”
My breath caught, and I had to look away from the screen for a moment, until Harlow spoke again.
“That’s gorgeous. I might steal that and pretend I said it first,” she laughed, and the audience laughed with her. The moment – the tension – broke, and I swallowed tightly.
“Well guys, the new album is out now, the tour has sold out everywhere, and you are performing for us after the break, which this audience is clearly very calm about.”
The floor actually seemed to shake with the audience’s screams.
“Join us after the break to see GVibes performing for us right here on the Harlow Harris Show.”
“So, everyone decided to believe that one, old news anchor over me,” Harlow lamented, taking a bite of her waffle, recounting how one influential reporter had basically rewritten the story of her love life.
“Oh, I hate that guy! He’s a misogynistic prick!” I bit out, angrily stabbing my fork into the massive plate of waffles and ice cream in the centre of the table.
Harlow laughed, raising her hand to cover her full mouth as her shoulders shook. She nodded enthusiastically, humming her agreement.
After the show, we’d gone to a bistro not far from the studio for what Harlow had called ‘girl dinner’, which apparently meant waffles and wine. When she’d asked me to come for a drink, I’d assumed a coffee, but I was very much okay with this arrangement. We were seated discreetly at the far end of the dining room, tucked into a booth.
We’d spent the past hour talking, somehow falling into an easy rhythm as if we’d been friends for years.
“He was the worst,” she nodded sagely, putting her fork down to reach for her wine. “Straight up called me a whore on his late-night show. Next day the tabloids picked up on it and voilà! ‘Whorelow’ was born.”
She took a sip of her wine, staring off at something in the middle distance. My lip curled in disgust. “How the fuck does he get away with it?” I slumped back in my chair, resisting the urge to pick up my own glass, mindful of how many I’d had.
Harlow raised her eyebrows and blew out a breath. “He’s old.”
I snorted.
“He’s been with the network for so long, they’d probably have to dig him out.” She grimaced.
“Like a tick,” I added, making her laugh.
“Exactly!”
After a moment, though, her laughter faded, and her expression morphed into something softer. More contemplative.
“It feels like there should be rules about this sort of thing,” she said, “the way people are allowed to pick apart a person’s life and make up stories to sell papers. But there’s not. You can say pretty much whatever you like, so long as you’re not accusing them of a crime.”
I frowned. “Could you not have sued for libel?”
Harlow sighed. “Maybe. We could have argued the case for damage to my reputation, but in the end we decided that even if we won, it wouldn’t stop people saying it. It probably would have made it worse, because I’d be the woman who sued over a shitty nickname, and he would be a martyr.” She raised a shoulder, only to let it slump.
“Is that why you’ve not retaliated over the recent stories?” I asked, cautiously.
I watched her with interest. During the past couple of hours I had let myself forget who I was sitting with. It was so easy to do because Harlow was just like me in a lot of ways. I had found it disarmingly easy to relate to her, but on the topic of her love life being dissected by the media I found it all too easy to re-categorise her as ‘celebrity’. It was discomforting to acknowledge that she represented – to me, at least – a cautionary tale of what happened when the public turned against you. Admittedly, Harlow had started out already famous. She had divided people based on their music tastes long before they ever became interested in her love life.
“Partially, yes,” she answered after some consideration. “But truthfully, I’m just tired, Kaiya. I’m tired of explaining my love life to people who have no business knowing a goddamn thing about it. I’m tired of explaining that no, I am not going to have Harry fired from the show. He was there today, doing his job producing the show, just like he’s been doing for the past two years without any input from me. And I’m real fucking tired of people making up reasons for why we broke up. They’re so desperate for a scandal that even when I’m telling them the truth, they insist it has to be something other than what it is.”
“What was it?” I asked, running my finger along the rim of my glass.
Harlow blew out a breath and looked at the ceiling, and I worried I’d maybe pushed too much. As far as I’d seen when I’d written my article about her, she’d never actually given a specific reason. Neither of them had – which, now that I looked at the pinched set to her mouth, I wondered if that was perhaps an answer in itself.
“It’s true that we grew apart,” she said eventually, “but that was mostly because I began to feel like we didn’t know each other anymore. It got to be that I’d come home after being away, and all I’d want was for him to hold me, y’know? And instead it felt… empty. It felt like I loved a ghost. The memory of someone.”
She looked down at the table, blinking quickly. “I’d watch him at work and it was like looking at someone I knew years ago. The man I lived with… that wasn’t him. He was the same in every other way. He had the same opinions, he took his coffee the same way, but emotionally he wasn’t the man I loved. He wasn’t there for me anymore.”
My finger stilled on my glass.
