Jaeyong snorts, scrubbing down a plate with a particularly loud squeak. “Yeah, ’cause you didn’t let me be bossy. Every project we ever had, we had to go with your ideas.”

“That’s ’cause my ideas were always superior. Or are you remembering the grades we got differently?” I grin when he swears in French under his breath, murmuring to himself, not calling me names, but just being annoying.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Jaeyong turns to look at me as I finish up drying the plates and stacking them away in my sparsely occupied cupboards. He smiles at me when he catches my eye, leaning to the side just enough that we sort of bump shoulders, a friendly I’m here that has that tightness, that ache, trying to claw its way up my throat.

“You don’t know what it’s been like over here,” he says, paying attention to handing me over a soaking wet plate and not really looking at me, shy, unsure.

“Were you very lonely?” I ask, voice hardly above a whisper, hard to make out over the sound of running water.

Jaeyong shrugs, and that definitely means a yes. “I had good days and bad days, just like anybody else. My hyungs helped me out, talked me through it, even if they didn’t get it. I became a trainee when I was fifteen, a little older than the other kids, obviously—the maknae was thirteen. Thirteen years old, and already working. I was angry a lot of the time, wondering why it didn’t come easier for me, why I had to work so much harder than everyone else.”

“But you’re an amazing dancer—you’re so fluid. What do they say? Like smoke coming off a wick of a candle? Yeah. That’s you, Jaeyong.” I move my hands around, trying to act fluid when I am not.

Jaeyong won’t look at me, even if I can see the flush under his golden skin. “I was always really hard on myself, you know that.”

“Guess you didn’t grow out of that, huh?”

Jaeyong shakes his head, grinning, bumping me with his hip so I almost go flying into the counter, not prepared at all for that kind of playfulness.

“It was hard, being a trainee, getting accustomed to school here. I had to get used to wearing a uniform again, and they give you this little name tag thing, and it’s odd. Stricter rules on the way you look—skirt length, hair length for guys, earrings for guys…just took some getting used to. I was tired all the time, all the time.” He groans up to the ceiling, remembering.

“It took me a while to find friends that weren’t part of what would become Trickshot. High school was hell. I tried hard to fit in, even as the foreign kid, found the other foreign kids, too, doing the same thing I was for different companies. My Korean got a shit ton better though, let me tell you.” Jaeyong smirks, turning to look at me, the smirk turning into a grin.

My poor heart’s doing acrobatics in my rib cage, and I pull in a sharp breath through my nose, glancing away, as if Jaeyong’ll figure me out. How inconvenient would that be—wanting that from him when he doesn’t want that at all?

Yup, we just gotta get over this little crush. It’s fine. He’ll fart in front of you or something and it’ll be all she freaking wrote.

“I got to read Dragon Ball in Korean, though, which was an experience.”

I snort. “Don’t get me started on written Korean, I had such a hard time with it, still kinda do. I wouldn’t mind reading it in Korean, though, if you’re offering to let me borrow it.”

“It took me twelve years to get my volume 10 back, do you think you’ve earned it, Raleigh-ssi?”

Is he flirting? Is Jaeyong flirting with me? I just can’t tell. Maybe he’s just being playful, maybe he doesn’t know how to turn off the ‘I’m an attractive K-pop idol and you’re not’ button and I’m being hit over the head with his aura.

“Hey, I’ll lend it to you, okay? Better yet, why don’t I take you to the comic book cafes around here?”

I nearly drop the plate I’m drying, have been drying for the last couple of minutes. “Say what now?”

Jaeyong laughs, the odd, booming one that always used to surprise me, too big for his smaller body, but fitting him just perfectly right now, filling up the entire apartment with the sound. Still snickering, he says, “Comic book cafes. Did you not know that cafe culture in Seoul is real?”

I shake my head, making a mental note to explore more besides going out for groceries or searching out the things I forgot to buy for the apartment. I haven’t explored in forever, I missed out on all the cool things Montreal had to offer—Igloofest in the winter, the jazz festival in the summer, the Just For Laughs festival…all of it, without me participating in it, just being a boring homebody.

I promised myself that when I got here things would be different, that I would be different, and it’s time to make good on that promise.

A worldwide catastrophe could literally happen any single day now and I need to visit a comic book cafe like I need chocolate the days leading up to my period or else there’s gonna be bloodshed.

My brain’s still processing the fact that there’s such a thing as comic book cafes—God, I don’t even know what that looks like, honestly, but I’m dying to find out—when it finally catches up to me the rest of what he said.

“You wanna take me? Isn’t that like, a really bad move?” I ask, putting a plate away, watching him wash down my kitchen sink, all done with the dishes and frying pan and everything.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

I snort again, huffing out an exasperated laugh. “Because you’re you. Are you allowed to go out by yourself? Like, objectively speaking, is that a good idea?”

Jaeyong continues washing down my sink, not saying anything, making me wait, testing my very low threshold of patience before I feel like flipping tables. I whip the semi-soaked dish towel on the counter and leave him to it, heading into my bedroom to make my bed, whipping the sheets about, fluffing the pillows and punching them down with an unnecessary amount of force.

“Wanna watch something?” Jaeyong yells. I hear him turn off the faucet, rubber gloves squeaking, the sound traveling all the way to my bedroom. “Can I approach, or do you want to rip my head off?” he calls from the hallway, voice getting closer and closer until he peeks around the door frame, trying to make a small target when he’s six three and close to two hundred pounds; the guy is not subtle, no matter how hard he tries to be.

Jaeyong’ll always stand out, always.

I’m getting sappy. Stop. Just stop.

“Oh, it’s so you!” His eyes are wide now, taking everything in, from the double bed (yup, with more pillows since it’s who I am as a person), my little cute nightstands that I found in my favourite colour (buttercup yellow), a stained-glass lamp that’ll always remind me of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, the gray duvet, and the pale yellow I painted the walls.

“You don’t know about my life,” I say in mock-offense, shooing him out of the way so we can head to the living room, where it’s safer. “I like how you basically just stole my favourite part of the couch, Jaeyong.” He’s plopped himself down on my usual seat, closest to the kitchen, obviously, so I never have to round my makeshift coffee table to get to the fridge.

“Yellow’s always been your favourite colour, it’s confirmed: Raleigh Montgomery has not changed.” Jaeyong puts his hand up, as if running it over an invisible banner hanging in mid-air, like something out of Harry Potter.

Fidgeting, I get comfortable beside him, leaving enough room that I can kick out my legs if I want to, and far enough from Jaeyong that he clearly will have no idea that I find him attractive and adorable.

I watch Jaeyong get more comfortable, handing me my remote, yawning around his free hand, then running it through his hair, trying to coax it into lying back on his head with how rough he’s being with himself.

“I’ll watch anything,” he says to the room, and I immediately pull up What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim? putting him to the ultimate test.

“Shit, I really liked this one. Have you seen it before?”

I shake my head, because having watched half of the first episode doesn’t count after I fell asleep, wine-drunk on a particularly lonely night last week, but Jaeyong doesn’t need to know that, doesn’t want to know that.

I pull up the first episode, adding the Korean subtitles to help me out—sometimes the characters talk way faster than I can understand, so subtitles always help, even if they are distracting, and I’m almost up to speed at reading them quick enough before they disappear on me.

But the gist of the show is: attractive male lead, attractive female lead—gee, I wonder what’ll happen?

I clutch one of my pillows and hug it to my middle, bring up my legs to sit cross-legged, letting Jaeyong know that he can sit how he wants, too, and watch him pull a leg up underneath himself and practically sit on his ankle.

It hits sometime during the second episode that this is good, easy even, the way we’re comfortable around each other, as if a whole decade of waiting to be in the same room again has been stored up and finally let out.

I don’t feel terribly awkward, even if there is this weird one-sided-attraction thing going on now. I mean, I knew that Jaeyong was already beautiful, so it’s not a total surprise that he’s super handsome by Korean beauty standards as well—he’s tall, has full lips, clear skin, perfect hair.

But he’s so much more than that, deserves so much more than to be held up to those standards and expectations.

Jaeyong deserves someone who can always make him laugh at the end of a hard day, hold him tight, tight, tight when he’s exhausted from his daily schedule, sing him a lullaby so he can sleep, read to him when he needs it, actually make him meals that he can eat while he’s dieting and training hard. He needs someone that won’t make him question himself, someone he can rely on, depend on, even if it’s to trust that person to hold him upright when all he wants to do is collapse.

And it hurts to admit it, yeah, but there’s always something to learn when admitting my own weaknesses.

I cringe away from the spotlight, from all the attention. Hell, I don’t even have any social media accounts, got rid of them a few years ago when I found out how much time I was wasting every single day scrolling through them, comparing myself to random people I hadn’t spoken to since high school. I was tired of not measuring up.

Like it or not, I think that whoever dates an idol, well, they’re not going to measure up in the eyes of the media, in the eyes of netizens that are fans and that are not fans alike. It’s just something that’s definitely going to happen, like how we judge celebrities back home, make judgments and cast aspersions on them, too.

So no, I’m not strong enough for that kind of constant scrutiny, where I won’t ever measure up. I don’t need that kind of comparison tug-of-war in my life, don’t need others to make judgments on whether I’m beautiful enough, smart enough, skinny enough to make a man like Min Jaeyong happy.

This is great though, getting this time with him, watching a drama in the quiet of my living room, like it’s a movie night back at Mins’ and we finished our homework for the weekend and we could overdose on Dragon Ball before dipping our toes into other anime.

I glance over at Jaeyong, sighing when I find him napping, his body turned toward me, elbow on the back of the couch, head cradled in his hand, eyes closed, breathing deep and even.

Even in sleep, his mouth is shaped in such a way that his dimples pop out, like he’s having a really great dream.

I leave him be, turn the volume down a little lower, and watch the drama by myself, snickering at some parts, trying to stifle tears at others, the male lead driving me nutso and then making me want to pledge my undying devotion in the next moment. I’m exhausted.

At some point during the fourth episode Jaeyong lists forward, his body slumping to the side and falling…straight into my lap.

Oh, Jesus.

Really?

Am I being tested? I’m being tested, right?