Funfact! This story is about Onew's creative process and inspiration behind writing SHINee's song Juliette. In reality, Juliette's lyrics were written by Jonghyun, and the tune was taken from Corbin Bleu of High School Musical's second single, Deal With It.

A week later, after Jinki got back from a  drive to New York to visit Jonghyun and Minho, he would pick up lunch and intend to surprise Juliette at the studio with an early return. He parked and let himself in. The place had about two hours left to be open, but no one else seemed to be around at the end of the day. Despite the emptiness, he could hear the faint boom of music, and the floor vibrated slightly under his feet. He wandered to the large dance hall, and peered beyond the cracked door. What he saw made his jaw drop.

    It was Kate and Juliette, both sisters clad in sports bras and sweatpants. Juliette’s hair was not braided, only tied back in a ponytail, waves falling down her back and over her shoulders. And they were dancing the exact choreography of Super Junior’s Bonamana. He could tell, because he had tried to learn the dance once upon a time himself, and given up. He had been positive Juliette was a ballet student, but there she was, rocking her hips and rotating her shoulders to the music, keeping pace with her sister. He had never seen girls do the dance before, and with them it looked oddly like belly dancing to a strict mambo beat, bizarre and sultry and hip-hop. The instrumental boomed with bass and synthesizer, and Juliette kicked and slid. Left foot, right foot, slide, kick, left foot right foot.

    Step to me, step to me, said Super Junior from the boom box. And Juliette did.
    Jinki realized he felt butterflies bouncing around in his stomach. His heart was pounding in his chest, echoing in his ears. He couldn’t breathe. He felt the heat creeping up his back to his cheeks, and his palms were sweaty.

    Suddenly, she noticed him peering in the doorway, stumbled, slipped and fell. Jinki pushed the door the rest of the way open and went running to her aid. She went bright red, embarrassed by her appearance, and attempted to scramble away, but she was delayed by her injury and didn’t get anywhere before Jinki got to her and helped her up.

    “Sorry sorry sorry sorry. Are you okay?” he repeated over and over, brushing her off as if that might fix her aching backside.
    “You’re home early. Is something wrong?” She asked, one hand on his jean jacket sleeve, one on her sore right thigh.
    “I just wanted to come surprise you.” He said, biting his lips worriedly.
    Juliette pulled on her tee-shirt and smiled at him for a moment before going to get water, which he took as both a sign of her appreciation for the deed, and a sign she wasn’t seriously hurt.
    “Get a room.” Said Kate, and walked out to change and get water of her own.
    “What did you think?” Juliette asked, wrapping a towel around her neck like a scarf and braiding her hair.
    “Amazing!” Jinki cried outright, startling Juliette a bit. “Is that the song I put on the disc?”
    “Ah, yes. Kate and I listened to it, and she liked it quite a bit. So we Googled it and it turned out the men who did it had choreographed it, and she liked that too. So we learned it as a project just for fun.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me before that you were such a talented dancer? Do you think I could come with you to dance sometimes? I brought lunch.”
    “You never asked. Absolutely not. Great.”

    Jinki came by more and more often when Juliette was dancing. To his dismay, when she saw him glance in the open door she would stop dancing and come out to be with him, or if it was important, shut the door. He didn’t mention it openly to her, but his mood when she finished early or kept him waiting so she could finish without him gave her an intimation of how he felt on the matter. When he brought her dance up in conversations when they went on she would answer only some questions; she had been dancing since she moved to Boston a year ago, but set aside plenty of time to practice, hence the swift improvement. Whether or not she could ‘pop-lock-and-drop it’ remained undisclosed.

     He almost gave up on his quest to watch her dance without sneaking around. But one early Sunday morning she was particularly caught up in a routine with her sister and a few other girls from one of Kate’s hip-hop classes, and said nothing to Jinki when he slipped in the open door and took a seat on a stool in the corner. The next two times she didn’t let him in, but the time after that she did. He had gotten himself in.

    The song lyrics came to him over the days, nearly in excess. But they were no longer words about a boring girl. They had turned into a serenade about the mysterious, the unreachable, and a girl with an inexplicable and beautiful connection to light. He became a perfectionist, dealing not only with an image of love that would please the fans, but also the difficult and growing feelings he was now combating, which put a more real spin on the lyrics that could have otherwise been set in stone, and set in fiction at that.

    The clouds looked dismal and a deep gray the day he pulled up at the Seamstress’ place for Juliette. They had decided on exploring the North End, Jinki interested in the Italian neighborhood around the area, and Juliette determined to find Paul Revere’s house. He just had to do it, he told himself. He held the yellow bouquet of flowers a little too tightly in his right fist, and the wrapping made soft crinkly noises. He patted down his hair, nothing special she could about, tried knocking on the door and chickened out. The second time he managed it. Juliette opened it, smiled at the flowers, and then slammed the door back in his face.

    “Lemme get my coat! Just a second.” She called from inside.
    As she searched her closet for her black pea coat used for the colder seasons, she heard Jinki knock a few times more, increasingly frantically. She naturally decided to punish him for his impatience by taking a bit longer to locate the coat. When she finally opened the door back up, coat successfully found and put on, she saw what may have been the cause of his knocking so urgently. There was a stream of water cascading off the tip of his nose, his sweatshirt soaked through and plastered to his frame. Inches from where Juliette stood in the doorway, rain poured down in sheets.
    “Oh, do come in. We can stay home. I probably shouldn’t have kept you waiting.” She let out a brisk laugh, then felt bad about it. “I should’ve figured something like that was why you were knocking so frantically.”
    “That’s not why I was knocking so frantically. This was.” Jinki stepped inside, set the flowers on the top of the bureau, and really kissed Juliette on the mouth for the first time.

    They locked fingers with both hands, and his hands were so much bigger than hers her fingers hurt so spread out. He pressed his forehead against hers and they closed their eyes. The rain outside roared, and Juliette’s nose was bruising against his and Jinki forgot, if only for a moment, that he had only a month and a half left.