I need you
I wanted that. I want that. Goddamn Jihoon. I can’t stop staring at the screen where Jihoon is singing, eyes closed in the booth. His right hand is held up, and his finger makes a circle with his pinkie. Our sign.
Molasses slow, it occurs to me this is our song, the song we talked about in Toronto. I recognize the melody and some of the lines. He took our messing around and made it art.
Kit joins in the next chorus, and their voices rise in a duet before the rest of the band comes in. It’s a haunting tune, and I tear my eyes away to check the chat. It’s moving too fast for me to even read, but I catch the occasional English word as people try to describe what they hear: beautiful, yearning, passion, genius.
Then it fades, and the screen is blank. Jihoon is gone, the livestream over.
I jump to my feet, shaking my laptop. “What happened? Make it come back.” Frantic, I close the window and bring the browser back up. Nothing. “Hana, check your phone. Where did he go?”
Hana sits like a statue on the couch, mouth open. She looks over to where I’m now on social media, trying to find out what the hell is going on. The internet is in full meltdown, and #MinSong and #Turns are already trending. “Ari.”
“What?”
“That song’s for you.”
To hear her say what I was thinking causes me to stop what I’m doing. “How do you know?” I ask, wanting to know what she heard.
“The maze. The thread. Ariadne. He’s talking about you. It’s for you.”
I need to find those lyrics ASAP. “There was nothing about a thread.”
“Right, that was the Korean part. The lyrics are about following a thread out to the light. Ariadne gave Theseus the thread to find his way out of the maze.”
I collapse on the couch, staring between Hana and my phone. “Did he tell you he was doing this?”
She shakes her head and glances at her phone. “Wait. He mentioned his new social media.” She taps in the search and brings up a new account headed with a casual selfie of Jihoon. The follower count clicks up and up as I watch. It has a single post. A tiger flower.
Hana taps again. “Holy shit. Kit. Sangjun. Xin. Daehyun. All of them have launched their own accounts and under their own names, not their stage names.”
She shows me, and every member of the band has posted the same image as Jihoon in solidarity, and each already has likes in the hundreds of thousands. “Newlight is screwed,” she crows. “This is unbelievable. StarLune is finally taking control.”
I nod, barely listening. That this is unprecedented is clear from the comments, and I’m scrolling so fast, I’m accidentally liking posts when my fingers tap hurriedly on the screen.
“Check that email,” Hana says. “Check it right now.”
I do. There’s another message.
Ari—I miss you.
“Tiger flowers,” I murmur, thinking about the video. “He talked to me about them.”
“They’re Jihoon’s birth flower,” Hana supplies.
“He mentioned it.”
“Did he tell you the meaning?”
I shake my head and swipe at my eyes. “He’d only told me the meaning for primrose.” Loveliness.
“Please love me.” She grabs my hand, hard. “That’s what tiger flowers mean. He’s told two million people he’s in love with you.”
Fifty
The alley. The background to the livestream was familiar for a reason. I know the place because I took Jihoon there myself. He’s not in a Canadian-looking neighborhood of Seoul. He’s here, in Toronto.
“I need to go,” I blurt. Then I don’t move, looking between the door and the screen. Do I want to do this again? I said in my email that I didn’t know how to get back to what we were, and Jihoon’s given me a path. I want to take it but am unsure if I have the guts.