Page 6 of Hamartia

“Course I do…” I manage. “Yeah, it was.”

“Fuck, now I’m horny.”

Yeah. Me too.

“Listen, babe, I need to go get some food. I never ate on the plane and my stomach feels like it’s about to eat itself. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“I guess I’ll just have to get one of my toys out…” She sighs, forlornly. “Think about you instead.”

I groan. For all sorts of reasons. “Yeah, think about me. I’ll do the same while I shower. Think about you, I mean. Not myself.”

Think about him, more like.

Camille laughs. “Okay, call me tomorrow, not later. Because it’s already later here. Love you, puppy.”

I watch until the end of the music video—he appears again, in a black corset this time, looking like some kind of dark fae prince—then I place the call to room service and strip off to take a shower before it arrives. I need to come. I try to pretend it’s because I know my beautiful girlfriend is in a hotel using her vibrator while thinking of me, and for the first minute at least, it is.

But then it’s about him.

About how pale his skin looked under that black shirt, about how that corset would look against it with nothing underneath. Then I imagine him in just the corset and a pair of women’s panties and stockings. It’s not the first time I’ve imagined him in women’s underwear. That all started because one time I googled him and found a photo shoot from about five years ago where they had him wearing fishnets. I thought about it all fucking day. The skin—smooth like a girl’s—pressing against the criss-cross fabric. When the thought of his dick pressed against it burst through my head, I thought I was going to come in my fucking boxers.

It’s crazy, all of it. How a single fucking picture of a guy can have this effect on me.

I’m not gay, I know I’m not.

Camille is my ideal woman. She’s funny, talented, smart, and gorgeous. I love her and I constantly think about fucking her. But then…there’s him.

In the two years since I became aware of this guy’s existence, I’ve forced myself to think of other guys in the same sorts of ways that I can’t seem to stop myself thinking of him—it just doesn’t work. I mean, guys I know who are considered objectively hot. Fuck, I see Mason naked often enough and I can categorically say that it’s never once crossed my mind that I want to fuck him. I’m not even sure that’s what I want from Lee Jeyhun. I’m not sure I would know what to do if he bent over, spread his ass, and begged me for it.

Great. Fuck. Like I needed my mind to gothere.

But then I’m coming into my hand with the image of him bent over in the shower, hairless ass dripping with water and my fucking come, those eyes dazed and spent as he looks over his shoulder at me.

I get out of the shower feeling dirtier than when I went in. But clearly I’m not done, because after I dress in a pair of sweatpants and t-shirt, I lie back on the bed and pull up YouTube on my phone to find the music video from earlier.

It’s new, YouTube tells me. Released 3 hours ago. 12.5 million views and 800k comments beneath it already. Fucking hell. It would take close to six months for one of our videos to do those numbers, if it ever did.

But then, it’s like everything these guys touch turns to gold. Feels like they’re taking over the world and the rest of us can only sit back and watch as they do it. They’d been sort of big when we’d played the same bill back in Paris; now they’re stratospheric. A monolith of popularity hanging over the music industry like one of those alien spaceships.

I watch the MV twice before the room service arrives. While I’m eating, Zeke messages to say they’re going out to get trashed and to meet them in the lobby in thirty if I fancy it. I do, but we’ve got soundcheck at 1pm and now I’ve fallen down one of my Jaehyun wormholes I can’t physically drag myself out of it, even if I wanted to.

I check his Insta after I’ve eaten, to see he’s posted the new music video with the usual Korean caption that I have to ask the app to translate for me. It says, “Some Birds Don’t Fly.” The song is called “White Dove” and so it’s apt, I guess.

There’s a ring around his profile pic which tells me he’s posted a story and so I click on it to find him cycling his bike around some city at night, Seoul I imagine. His eyes are creased with laughter behind his white face mask and ball cap. He’s with someone, a guy, one of his bandmates maybe, but I can’t tell which one because he’s also wearing a mask. He’s swerving his bike a little as he tries to film which only makes them laugh harder. He has a deep laugh. Not like his singing voice would hint at.

The next story is him in a restaurant, a bowl of steaming noodles in front of him as he slurps loudly and shows us out the window.

The final story is a screen cap of the new video showing it at 10 million views on YouTube with some crying and heart emojis. 10 million views in two hours. Mind blowing.

I throw my phone down with a curse. I need to fucking stop this. Like seriously, stop this. My obsession with this guy became weird a long time ago. Some dirty secret I have that no one knows about. Like watching furries porn or something. Worse maybe.

I try to imagine what Mase or Crawford would say if I mentioned it and a chill skitters from my scalp all the way down my spine. It needs to stop. I can stop. I still feel like I’m in control of it to some degree. Like I could stop if I want to—it’s just that I haven’t wanted to.

I go to bed hoping I have a sex dream about him because I still haven’t gotten over the one I had a few months ago where he rode me wearing fishnets and a thick silver chain necklace I could pull on. His nipples were pierced and he played with them as I came inside him.

The cars pick us up at 1pm and then I’m being driven with Mase and Crawford to the venue.

They smell like a late night, the sweet stale murmur of tequila and beer fogging up the inside of the suburban. Crawford’s dark hair hangs lank and unwashed, his face paler than usual. When Mason puts the window down, sticks his head out of it and groans, I can’t help myself, laughing into my hand as I scroll through my phone. Mason glowers at me. He looks better than Crawf does, but then he always does. Golden skin that always looks like he’s just stepped off the beach no matter how little sleep he’s had, and dark, almost black, eyes that hide a multitude. His beard looks a bit scruffier than usual, but other than that he looks fresh. He drops his eyes to my phone and then away again before his head falls back and he closes his eyes.