Page 106 of K-Pop Double Life

“Enough to expose their relationship completely.”

A silence settled over the bus.

“You don’t have to hear it,” Aidan told me.

“I want to know.”

He pressed a button.

For several seconds there was only muffled movement. Then Sang-hoon’s voice filled the bus.

When this tour is over, I don’t want to go back to pretending.

My own voice answered him, quiet and unmistakable.

Neither do I.

Aidan stopped the recording.

No one looked at us.

They didn’t have to. Those words had been spoken in my hotel room in São Paulo, behind a locked door. Grace had found a way inside the one place where Sang-hoon and I had believed we were safe.

I took his hand.

“If I cancel because I’m afraid, Sara doesn’t only steal the concert from fifty thousand fans. She steals another piece of my life.”

“What if people find out about us?” Sang-hoon asked.

“They’ve already seen you save my life. If they ask questions, I’m not going to pretend I wish those photographs had never been taken.”

Eun-ji studied me. “You’re saying we don’t hide.”

“I’m saying we perform the concert.” I looked at Sang-hoon. “After that, whatever happens, we face it honestly.”

Aidan nodded. “Liam and I will make World Cup Stadium the safest venue in Korea.”

The others began talking about new security arrangements, but I looked through the bus window as we drove through Incheon toward Seoul.

Somewhere beyond the highway, my parents were waiting for me. They knew nothing about the threats, the knife in São Paulo, or the man whose hand I was holding.

I had spent years telling myself there would be a better time to tell them everything.

But later kept moving.

“What are you thinking?” Sang-hoon asked.

“That I’m terrified.”

“I know.”

“Not only of dying.” I looked down at our joined hands. “I don’t want everything we are to exist only in hotel rooms and backstage corners. And I don’t want my parents to spend the rest of their lives believing they knew me when they only knew the version Starhouse sold them.”

He tightened his fingers around mine.

“I don’t want to lose you before we find out what we could be when we’re not hiding.”

Sang-hoon lifted my hand and pressed his mouth to my knuckles.