Page 69
“Fuuuuck,” I murmured, dragging a hand down my face.
My phone buzzed again.
Joon
You went quiet.
[Sent 00:10]
I bit my lip, tapping my fingers against my thighs. Then, because apparently Champagne had seeped into the part of my brain responsible for self-preservation and drowned it, I typed back.
Me
I’m thinking.
Joon
About?
[Sent 00:11]
I glanced around the van. No one was paying attention. Half the crew looked unconscious. I lowered the brightness on my screen anyway.
Me
How close I’d need to be to properly appreciate the choreo.
The second I sent it, my soul left my body, and I raised my backpack to my face to silently scream into it. I locked my phone and shoved it face down against my thigh. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” I mouthed as a lightheadedness that had nothing to do with all the glasses of Champagne stole over me.
My phone buzzed. I waited an entire minute just to prove to myself that I had some restraint.
Joon
How close would you like to get?
[Sent 00:13]
I locked the screen in a panic as I choked on air.
I did not dare reply, and thankfully, neither did he.
Chapter 23
There was a little over a week between the Oakland and Chicago concerts, but this didn’t mean downtime for GVibes. They were flying out to New York to tape Saturday Night Live, before almost immediately flying to Chicago.
The way the scheduling had been worked out for tour stops, live TV, or radio performances, interviews, award shows… everything was balanced on a knife’s edge. Or, so it seemed to me anyway.
I’d learned from Jackson that some of the set-pieces that had been leap-frogged from LA to Chicago had been damaged in transit, so replacement pieces from Oakland were being delivered by train while the broken pieces were being repaired in Chicago. I listened to his words. I understood all the individual ones, but the way he talked about it gave it the kind of weight I might have expected from someone at NASA describing spaceship mechanics.
The bad luck continued when Lee caught a cold. From the way the on-tour medical team had been dispatched, it had been assigned the same level of importance as, say, the plague. He had been isolated from the rest of the team, so while the other members spent the few days before flying to New York in a spa resort, Lee stayed behind. He was also not going to New York. He would meet back up with them in Chicago in order to rest as much as possible.
Because the group had left to go spend the free time before New York getting massages, or hot stone treatments, or whatever the hell people did in spas, I hadn’t seen Jihoon, or spoken to him at all since our flirty text exchange. I was annoyed to admit it was making me anxious.
“Maybe he feels weird about it,” Becka said, shrugging her shoulders as she carefully applied a layer of cherry blossom-pink nail polish to her big toe as we sat in her bedroom at her parents’ house. I’d been spending some of my downtime here with her while she settled back in.
Unlike my bedroom back in Cumbria, Becka’s room was frozen from when she’d last lived here in her late teens. There were even still posters on the walls. Long-since disbanded boy bands and inspirational quotes like, ‘If I burn my bridges, at least they’ll light my way forward.’
“Why would he feel weird about it?” I grumbled, tossing my phone down onto the floor beside where I sat.
