The K-Pop Idol in My Room

Part One — Out of the Rain

It was raining.

The rain that falls at the end of summer, just before dawn, is cold. It was the first week of September—the days still held their heat, but autumn had already crept into the early-morning air. Seoha didn’t have an umbrella. There might have been a folding one somewhere in her bag, but she didn’t bother to look. Her shoulders and her shoes were already soaked through. For someone who couldn’t get any wetter, an umbrella was a luxury.

She’d been fired today.

To be exact, what she’d heard was, “Could you just work through the end of the month?” The owner of the bakery café—a little place called Oven—had pulled her aside at closing. He fidgeted with the paper cup in his hand, not quite meeting her eyes. Business was slow. The rent had gone up again. He had to let one part-timer go, and starting with the most recent hire was the least painful way to do it, he said. And he really did look sorry while he said it.

Seoha told him she understood. She didn’t get angry. She’d worked there two years. Coming in at five in the morning to set the dough, waiting for it to rise, gauging the oven’s heat with the back of her hand, lining up the fresh-baked loaves on the shelf. She loved that moment—when the smell of bread rising filled the shop. The most honest smell in the world, she thought. It rose exactly as much as the work you put in, and it sank without fail if you got lazy.

Loving the work didn’t keep her from getting fired.

The landlord had texted yesterday. You know it’s coming out of your deposit next month, right. He meant the two months of rent she was behind on. Seoha hadn’t answered the message, thrown at her without even a period at the end. There was nothing to say. The deposit was five million won, the back rent already a million two. At this rate, the deposit would be gone before spring.

Twenty-four years old. One point four million won left in her bank account—a little over a thousand dollars. When she thought of the balance, something colder than the rain sank slowly beneath her ribs.

It’s fine.

She murmured it inside. A phrase that had stuck to her since she was a kid. It’s fine. I’ll figure it out somehow. On the day her mother left, and on the day her father followed her out the door, alone in that one-room apartment, Seoha had said it then too. It’s fine. If crying could have fixed anything, she’d have cried all she wanted—but crying changed nothing. So instead of crying, Seoha baked bread. When her hands were busy, her heart was a little less busy. At least while she was kneading dough, she could forget she was alone.

The alley in Haeon-dong was steep. It was an old neighborhood. For ten years there’d been talk of redevelopment, and for ten years it had stayed exactly the same—slate roofs, low walls, faded signs. At four in the morning, only a single streetlight was still awake in the alley. The rest had burned out long ago, or the district office had never bothered to replace them. Under that one surviving light, the rain slanted down.

And beneath it, someone had collapsed.

At first she thought it was a pile of trash someone had dumped. Black clothes. A black cap. A shape slumped against the wall. Seoha stopped walking. Probably just a drunk, she figured, and almost passed by. Her day hadn’t left her with enough room to look after a strange man crumpled in an alley before dawn. Fired, chased by rent, soaked to the bone—it was the end of a day like that. She was in no position to worry about anyone else.

But the man was shaking.

Not from the cold. Seoha knew the difference. A body shaking from cold and a body collapsing from the inside out shake in different ways. The man couldn’t catch his breath. One hand clutched at his chest, and he gasped in short, shallow pulls, like someone with an invisible hand around his throat. Rainwater ran down the brim of his cap and dripped onto those thin, ragged breaths.

“…Hey.”

She found herself stepping closer. She couldn’t see his face under the rain-soaked brim.

“Hey. Are you okay?”

The man lifted his head.

The streetlight grazed his face. He was pale. His lips had no color, his eyes no focus. A good-looking face—unreally so. But Seoha was in no state to register that. Because the face looked like a man dying.

“You—can’t breathe?”

The man managed a nod. Even that seemed to cost him.

Seoha crouched down beside him. She knew what to do. Once, a long time ago, someone else had failed to breathe like this. She didn’t want to remember that day, but her hands remembered it for her. Pushing the memory away, she laid a hand on the man’s back. Through the wet fabric, a heart pounding like mad came through against her palm.

“Slow down. Follow me. Breathe in… hold it… and out.”

His clouded eyes turned toward her.

“You’re not dying. This isn’t the kind of thing you die from. Even if it feels like you can’t breathe, you actually can. You just have to breathe. Look at me. Follow me.”

Seoha pressed a hand to her own chest, slow and exaggerated. In. Out. His gaze followed her hand. It took a long time. There in the rain, under that single streetlight, the two of them breathed together. In, and out. In, and out. Like two people for whom nothing else in the world existed.

At last his breathing slowed. The shaking eased. The man leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Then, for the first time that night, he let out one long, proper breath.

“…Thank you.”

His voice was hoarse. Like an instrument left untouched for years.

“Should I take you to a hospital? I can call for an ambulance. If this isn’t the first time, you really should get checked—”

The man’s eyes snapped open. For the first time, the blur in them sharpened into focus.

“No.”

The answer came too fast. Too fast for someone who couldn’t breathe a moment ago.

“No hospitals… please.”

Seoha looked at him. A strange man, soaked through with rain. His clothes were good. It was too dark to see well, but the fabric was a different grade from hers. The shoes looked expensive too. And yet—no wallet, no bag, no phone. Only a faint pale band on his wrist where a watch used to be. As if he’d stripped away everything that could prove who he was and run, with nothing but the body he stood in.

None of her business. Seoha started to get up. Before she got any wetter, she wanted to go inside, into a warm room, and put an end to this very long day.

“Then you’re on your own. I’m—”

The man caught her sleeve.

There was no strength in it. It wasn’t so much grabbing as clinging. Seoha stopped. The man raised his head and looked at her. In his eyes was the face of a person with nowhere left to go. A face Seoha knew far too well. One she saw in the mirror often enough.

“…Just a few days.”

The man said it.

“Just a few days. I won’t go anywhere. I won’t be any trouble. Just… somewhere out of the rain.”

Seoha stared at those words for a long moment.

It was insane. Taking a strange man she’d met in an alley before dawn into her home. The kind of thing that ended up on the news. She should refuse. Refusing was the right call. Her head was saying so, plainly.

But in that moment, Seoha saw herself. Saw the version of her walking through the rain with two months of back rent, a lost job, and a bank account holding 1.4 million won. She knew what it was to have nowhere to go. To not have a single eave in the whole world that would take you in. The one with nowhere to go wasn’t only this man.

“…I don’t have money,” Seoha said.

“I really don’t have anything. The most I can give you is some bread crumbs.”

The man let out a laugh—incredulous, and somehow crumbling at the same time. Standing there in the rain. That laugh lodged itself, strangely, somewhere in her chest.

“Bread… sounds good.”

Seoha sighed. She had no idea what she was doing. She only knew that if she left this man out in the rain, she wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.

Getting him to his feet took a while. He was tall, and his legs had no strength, so he kept folding. Borrowing half of Seoha’s shoulder, the two of them made it to the end of the alley. Her one-room place was right there where the alley ended—a semi-basement. Down the narrow steps one at a time, careful, through the steel door that always creaked, and Seoha pushed the man inside. When she turned on the boiler, the old pipes let out a low, aching groan. She tossed him a dry towel and stood in front of the sink—too sad a thing to really call a kitchen.

The room was barely two hundred square feet. A folded blanket against one wall, a small TV, a rack with a few clothes hanging off it. And on the shelf beside the sink, lined up neatly, her bread-making tools. Measuring cups, a scraper, a wooden rolling pin. She couldn’t make whatever she wanted at the shop, so she’d bought them one at a time, telling herself she’d at least bake at home on her days off. The one luxury that didn’t fit her broken little life.

She set water on the gas burner. One pack of instant noodles. Half a bowl of cold rice. That was everything in the house.

The man sat in a corner of the room, drying his wet hair roughly with the towel. When he took off the cap, his whole face came into view. Truly, unreally handsome. Even more so under the fluorescent light. Seoha registered the fact for a second, then forgot it. A handsome face didn’t buy ramen. It didn’t cover the rent, either.

While the water boiled, the man hummed something, low.

There were no words. Four notes. Up, down a step, then up again. A melody that was somehow sad and somehow familiar. It seemed to leak out of him without his knowing. As if the humming were his own way of soothing a body that had fallen apart. Seoha listened to it absently as she cooked. A good voice, she thought, just for a moment.

“You… sing?”

Seoha asked.

The humming stopped dead. The man clamped his mouth shut, as if covering it with his hand. Like someone caught at something he was never supposed to be caught at.

“…No.”

The man said.

“It’s just a habit.”

Seoha didn’t press. Prying wasn’t her way. She ladled the noodles into a bowl and set it in front of him. Steam rose off it. The man took the bowl and stared into it for a long time. As if he were seeing ramen for the first time. Or as if he hadn’t eaten in a very, very long time.

“…Thank you for the food,” the man said quietly. The courtesy of it, for a bowl of instant noodles, struck Seoha as a little odd.

He lifted one chopstickful to his mouth. And then, for a beat, he stopped.

Seoha pretended not to see. When a grown man’s eyes go red over a bowl of ramen, the polite thing is to pretend you don’t notice. She stirred her own half-bowl of cold rice into the broth and turned her gaze, on purpose, toward the TV.

“What’s your name?”

Seoha asked.

The man swallowed and hesitated a moment. A silence like choosing something. A man who hesitated even over his own name.

“…Yunho. Cha Yunho.”

“I’m Han Seoha.”

“…Han Seoha-ssi.”

The man tried the name out once. Carefully, the way you’d repeat a foreign word you’d never heard before.

“Cha Yunho-ssi. It really is just a few days. Got it? I’m not exactly in a great spot myself.”

“Yeah. …I know.”

The man—Yunho—nodded. Cupping the bowl in both hands, his face, for the first time, a little more at ease.

That night, Seoha laid the blanket out on one side of the small room and gave it to Yunho. She lay down against the opposite wall with her jacket over her. If someone had asked whether she wasn’t scared, sleeping in one room with a strange man, she wouldn’t have known what to say. She only knew there was no dangerous scent coming off him. If anything, he seemed too powerless to be dangerous.

The rain tapped at the semi-basement window. A strange man’s breathing shared the room. Steady now, no longer catching. Listening to it, Seoha thought: tomorrow’s problems can wait for tomorrow. Today had been too long a day.

And she fell asleep.

The morning was gray.

The rain had stopped, but the sky still hung heavy. Through the basement window she could see only the ankles of people passing in the alley. Feet folding umbrellas, shoes hurrying off to work. Seoha woke with a stiff neck. For a second she forgot there was a man in her room, then remembered.

Yunho was still asleep. Deeply. Like someone who hadn’t woken once all night. On the wrist sticking out from under the blanket was a small scar she hadn’t seen in the dark last night. Inside of the left wrist. An old, faint scar. Seoha looked at it for a moment, then drew her eyes away. That, too, wasn’t something to ask about. Everyone lives carrying a scar or two they’d rather not show.

Out of habit, Seoha turned on her phone and hit the power button on the little TV. The channel with the morning news. The volume turned low. Now that she was out of a job, she’d have to start hunting for another bakery gig. Counting in her head how many résumés to send out today, she watched the screen without really seeing it.

And then she stopped.

Filling the screen was a man’s face.

A caption scrolled past.

[BREAKING] ECLIPSE’s “Dohyun” Out of Contact After Leaving Dorm Before Dawn… Agency: “Trying to Locate Him”

Seoha looked at the screen.

Looked at the man’s face on it. The face smiling flawlessly on a stage, bathed in thousands of lights.

And then, slowly, she turned her head to look at the face of the man asleep in the corner of her room.

It was the same face.

Her heart dropped a beat late. She thought she must be seeing it wrong. She looked at the screen again. Looked at the man again. Screen. Man. Screen. The sleeping man’s tousled hair, and the perfectly arranged hair on the screen. Too different to be the same person. Too identical to be someone else.

Just then, Yunho stirred awake. He looked up at the unfamiliar ceiling, looked at Seoha frozen beside him, looked at the muted TV screen—and stopped for a beat. For one very short instant, something flickered across his eyes. Something like the look of a person who’d been found out.

And then, as if nothing at all had happened, he asked in a hoarse voice,

“…Hey, do you happen to have a charger?”