Page 22 of When Worlds Collide (Between Worlds #2)

My eyebrows shot up, but I did as he instructed, handing over the little bottle of sparkly green nail polish we’d picked up in the shop earlier.

I watched, bemused as he continued where I had left off – his eyes screwed up in concentration as he deftly applied the polish to my toe nails.

There was something so bizarrely sexy about watching him do that, whether it was the look of concentration on his face, or the way his dexterous fingers–

“We didn’t have many adventures,” he said, and for a second, I had no idea what he was talking about, before I picked up the dropped thread of our conversation from a few moments ago.

“My parents, they wanted me to focus on my studies. And my instruments.”

“What did you do on the weekends?” I frowned. No adventures?

“Those were the weekends,” he chuckled.

“I know you play drums and guitar,” I said, leaning back on my hands as I remembered the second day we’d met, when he’d helped me tune a bunch of new guitars. I remembered what he’d said when we’d played one of the songs he’d helped write for GVibes – ‘Broken Promise’.

“ I miss Busan. I wrote this song about what I thought my life was going to be like – back when I lived there. Before I moved to Seoul. Before GVibes .”

“Do you play anything else?”

He flicked his eyes up to meet mine, a small smile teasing at the corner of his lips.

“What?” I giggled as he ran a finger down my foot.

“Have you really never watched interviews? These questions, we get asked them a lot.” He turned his attention back to his task, focusing on the tiny polish brush.

He always seemed amazed that I didn’t know the tiny details about his life, and I guessed, when you were as famous as he was, past a certain point it probably was a bit unusual.

It must be so bizarre to have millions of people know so much about you.

“Honestly, I stopped looking at your social media when we were... getting to know each other.”

I couldn’t bring myself to call what we’d been doing ‘dating’ because long-distance calls and unspoken agreements hadn’t felt like it. Becka had called it a ‘situationship’, which felt about right.

Jihoon raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

I shrugged, but the memory of the days I’d spent obsessing over their fan-groups, and the media portrayals made me feel…

icky. I remembered how on edge it had made me feel, like I was missing out on something crucial.

I hadn’t been able to balance my own life with the overwhelming feeling that I needed to keep up with the constant movement of Jihoon, and GVibes, respectively, and after a time, I’d felt more like an obsessive fan, and less like the girl he’d eaten burgers with on the beach.

I’d lost sight of myself during that time, and it was only when I’d ducked out of the fan spaces that I’d been able to reclaim myself, and the relationship we’d been tentatively growing for ourselves.

So, no, I did not know the ins-and-outs of Jihoon’s entire life because I saw it on a variety show taping, or read it in a biographical column. If I wanted to know something about him, I had the best source of information right in front of me, currently painting my toenails.

“I feel like if I followed you online, I wouldn’t see you,” I said after a few moments of collecting my thoughts. “I’d see Baek Jihoon, GVibes' visual. I don’t want to be your fan. I want to be your girlfriend.”

He paused, a smile stretching across his face, before he straightened up to look over at me.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been happy to hear someone say they’re not my fan.”

His fingers held my foot, so gently as he lifted it so he could lightly blow over the wet lacquer.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said, suddenly remembering how we got to this point in the conversation.

Jihoon looked up at me from underneath his dark eyelashes. “Hmm?”

“Instruments. Apart from guitar and drums.”

“Ah. I play clarinet.” He shrugged.

“You play the clarinet?” I exclaimed.

“Hey! Careful,” he scolded me, gripping my ankle tightly and holding it safely out of the way of my other foot. “This is art.” He tapped my foot, and I went back to reclining.

“I didn’t know that.”

He hummed. “I also took violin lessons, but I wasn’t very good. My teacher did not like me.” He smirked at some remembered incident.

“Why?”

“She caught me trying to pluck it like a guitar.” He mimed holding a violin, but strumming it.

He screwed his face up and jerked his head around, as if he were an 80’s head-banger, and I burst out laughing.

He stopped, shaking his head to flip his hair out of his face and shot me the kind of grin that I imagined would have gotten him out of all sorts of trouble at school.

As soon as that thought entered my mind, another rode in on its heels, a curiosity that had simmered in the back of my mind.

“Why did your parents send you to New York? Was it just because they didn’t want you to pursue being a singer?”

Immediately, the smiled slipped from his face, but he didn’t dismiss the question outright.

“That was part of it,” he says slowly. “When the scouts held open auditions in the city, they would not let me go. I think they knew I would have gone anyway,” he huffed a small laugh.

“So, they left me with my halmeoni for the weekend. She lived alone, so they thought I would not go and leave her.”

“What happened?”

“My halmeoni took me,” he chuckled as he continued. “She waited in line with me all day. It was so hot, but we waited for hours, and ate flavoured ice cones to cool down.”

“What happened at the audition?”

“They rejected me.”

“What!”

“Hey, stop squirming.” He lightly flicked my toe. “Like trying to put polish on a squid.” He tutted, holding firmly onto my foot.

“I’m nearly done,” he said, holding my gaze, “if you promise to not move, I will tell you the rest of the story.”

Contritely, I nodded.

“Okay. The scouts did not like me.” He shrugged. “I did not sing as well as I could. I was nervous. I was only eleven. My voice…” he gestured vaguely at his throat, “I was young.” I stifled a laugh.

“What happened with your parents? Did they find out?”

He made a noise that was somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “That is when they decided to send me to New York.”

I couldn’t imagine it. I didn’t know his folks, and I didn’t want to unfairly judge them on a situation I wasn’t there for, but I just could not wrap my head around the idea of sending my eleven-year-old away because of a dream they wanted to follow, even if I didn’t agree with it.

I kept my mouth closed but–

“I can see what you’re thinking, jagiya,” he said. “You think so loud, it wakes me up in the night.” His tone was firm, but his face was anything but as he looked up at me, eyes soft.

“It wasn’t just that,” he continued. “They wanted to move abroad for business. This was a convenient excuse.”

He paused for just a second too long, and I watched, mesmerised at the play of emotions as they crossed his face.

“I wanted to stay with my halmeoni, but they said she was too old. I think they believed America would be the best opportunity for me. To learn English, to see more of my family, and yes – to forget all about being a performer.” His lips twisted in a wry smile. “That did not work.”

I was beginning to see a familial pattern… “Was your uncle…”

He nodded. “My uncle – my imo – was halmeoni’s second son. My father’s brother. He felt the same as she did. He also believed I should be allowed to follow my dream.”

It made sense now why his aunt and uncle had gone against his parent’s wishes to bring him back to Korea to audition for ENT.

His tone was wistful as he continued. “They took me to singing lessons while I lived with them. They told me I should be the person I thought I could be.”

Jihoon paused, and a look of such intense sadness crossed his face, it was like watching clouds pass over the sun. My stomach dropped.

“Where are they now?”

He took a breath, and seemed to hold it for a heartbeat, before he sighed.

“They died. A car crash, three years ago.” The words sounded practiced, like he’d said them so many times that the shape of his lips was just muscle memory. My hand moved up to flutter over my mouth, uselessly.

“I’m so sorry, Joon.”

He shrugged, but his face did not convey the same level of indifference as the gesture.

“I bet they were so proud of you.” I swallowed thickly, blinking to clear the sudden fog in my vision.

“I like to think they were.” He smiled then, looking up at me through hair that had fallen across his eyes. “They would have liked you.”

“Me? Why?” Although the observation caught me off guard, warmth bloomed in my belly at the idea of any family approval.

“Because you’re smart, kind, brave. And because you love me. They would have loved you for loving me.”

The words seemed to hang in the stillness of the room, floating on the barest breeze like dust motes, soft and fluffy.

“I don’t know about all the nice words,” I mumbled, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, “but the part about loving you is certainly true.”

Jihoon lifted my other foot up slightly, and blew across the newly painted nails. The glitter caught the rays of the sun as it streamed in through the window, even weak and dull as it was this late on a cold, December day.

“Is your grandma still in Seoul?” I asked, the barest notion crossing my mind that perhaps we could go visit her.

He pulled both of my feet forward in his lap, and began to rub them slightly, almost absent-mindedly.

“No,” he said after a moment, like he was remembering something.

“When my imo and imobu died, halmeoni moved to Busan to live with my parents.” He shifted, and ran his thumbs down the soles of my feet.

“She –” He blew out a harsh breath, and I watched him curiously, almost seeing the way he collected the words he wanted to say.

“Reporters followed her, after they died. They followed her because she is my halmeoni." His jaw clenched.