After he talked with his mom, he had Gap Jin book him on the first available nonstop flight from Seoul to New York, which was scheduled to depart the next morning at nine o’clock, and to arrange for a car to take him to Incheon Airport and another to meet him at JFK in New York. Jong Kook spent the rest of that Saturday packing and receiving the occasional update from his manager. Gap Jin spoke with the producers of the reality drama, and while he couldn’t get them to agree that the filming should be put on hiatus like Jong Kook had wanted, he did convince them to cut the crew down to the original two cameramen who had followed Jong Kook in the beginning. He also contacted the Running Man PD, telling him that Jong Kook would be out of the country for an indeterminate time.

Jong Kook was aware of the repercussions he might face from leaving with little notice. In addition to Running Man, he also had filming for another show, a fan signing in Busan, and a meeting with a composer who had been working on a new song for him. But none of that mattered to him. All he could think about was seeing her again. He worried that she would forget him, that their short time together would become a faded foreign memory, a memory that couldn’t compete with the ease she might feel being back home in her native country. He believed that she had the same feelings for him that he did for her, but they had never admitted, explicitly, their love for each other. He had been saving those words for when he proposed.

He didn’t want their relationship to be a memory. He needed her to know that he was devoted, and if that meant leaving his life and chasing her on the other side of the world, he was ready to do that.

The flight was fourteen hours. The time difference between Seoul and New York was also fourteen hours. So, although he left Seoul at nine o’clock in the morning, arriving in New York at what would have been eleven at night in Seoul, the time difference set him back to nine o’clock in the morning again. When the captain announced the time as they prepared to land, Jong Kook was struck by this, by how he had left at the same time that he was now arriving, as if time froze for him to find her.

He had no idea where in New York she was. He only had a slip of paper with the address she had written on it, and he hadn’t had time to look up the directions at home. He saw the driver in the terminal holding up a placard with Kim Jong Kook written across it. The driver nodded when Jong Kook showed him the address, and after retrieving his luggage, he led him and the two cameramen to the car waiting outside on that brisk May morning.

Jong Kook sat in the back and watched the cityscape flash past his window. He should’ve been tired but he wasn’t. He was too anxious about what was happening. He had planned to call her when he arrived, now that they were both on New York time, but after some thought, he decided that it would be better if he surprised her.

The city soon gave way to trees as the car headed north on the highway. They had been on the road for an hour already, and when Jong Kook asked, the driver told him that they still had another hour to go. The further north they drove, the less traffic they encountered on the road and the more beautiful the scenery had become. He could see rolling hills on both sides of the highway, and mountains in the distance. And when the driver exited the highway and drove through the main street in the middle of that upstate New York town, Jong Kook glanced at