Jongin’s expression was seared in her mind; she went home seeing flashes of his face in the glass windows of cars, in shop fronts of passing streets. Never had she seen such darkness, such troubled, morose eyes, in a boy who had a smile like sunbeams skimming on rivers.

It was guilt that convinced her to phone him, and the secret yearning for the sound of his voice that drove her to press it against her ear, despite her protesting heart.

“Hello?”

Blank. Brief. Emptied of the conflicting emotions she saw when he breezed out of the door. Bland as vanilla; flat and cool as river stones.

“Jongin, hey how are you?”

There was a scuffle, silence, but Jongin didn’t hang up, and she clung her hopes to that.

“Fine.” He sounded so incredibly tired. “So much work to catch up on though.”

“Oh, Jongin. Why didn’t you tell me? I could have talked mom into giving you a day off…”

“That Kyungsoo was there throughout the evening proves that you couldn’t spare any staff going remiss. It’s no problem.” He cleared his throat. He just sounded drained of his will and energy.

“Why did you call? I’ve a hunch that it isn’t just to ask about my well-being.”

Actually, that was the only reason. She had to listen to him speak again, because she couldn’t bear falling asleep to the echoes of his dismal anger.

She made something up on the spot.

“I’m calling to collect.”

“Oh?” he sounded genuinely surprised. “And what might that be?”

“A promise.” She paused briefly, sifting her words. “You said you had something to show me.”

She spent several seconds of listening to complete silence. Her grip on the phone grew slippery, slick, sweat a sheet over skin.

 “What was it?” she coaxed.

More scraping, as though Jongin was drawing a capped pen across the surface of his table.

“I wanted to give you a tour of my school. It was supposed to be a secret weapon,” he admitted with humour (finally!) seeping its colours into his tone. “Something I planned on whipping out if you’re ever down again.”

Her heart started beating a little faster. “Yes! I’d love to, Jongin.”

Jongin laughed, shedding his anger, all his thoughts evoking displeasure. “Okay, okay. This weekend, I’ll bring you in, show you the studios. Nothing is ever locked unless its late in the night because there’ll always be someone practicing.”

“You won’t get in trouble?”

“No one will bother to tell.”

She laughed. “Okay, Jongin.”

“Just promise you won’t swoon on me,” he teased.

“People involved in the performing arts are very devoted,” Jongin told her as they strolled under the late morning sun, Seoul yawning into life around them. “They come in at seven, leave at ten –at night,” he explained, skirting a puddle. “Mid-morning is really the best time to sneak you in because everyone will be in their studios.”

“What about you? Won’t the studios be full?”

“No. I have a special one reserved for myself.” There was a twinkle in his eyes, a temporary, scintillating star in swallowing obsidian.

Jongin touched her shoulder, nudged her down an unfamiliar alley. It was narrow, asphalt grey and worn, documenting the footsteps of time. It had fringes of barred windows, and great, gaping maws of plastic and metal bins. The buildings that shouldered them were only as tall as three-storeys, but they hid the sun, sheltered them from traffic.

“It cuts through the city,” Jongin explained. His rich honey hair had not lost its lustre in the caress of the shadows, and remained a beacon in the course of their passage. “Avoids main intersections. It’s dank, dull, and no one will curse at you if you have to knock down a few things when you’re late.”

“Are you often late?” she asked, amused.

His slim fingers threaded through soft locks. “I oversleep often, so yes.”

“A stack of manhwa is to blame for that, I assume?”

Jongin laughed softly, but surprised her when he said, “That, and a whole lot of other things.”

She wanted to ask what the ‘other things’ were, but Jongin’s stride was brisk, and it was a physical challenge to keep up. He was wearing comfortable attire: dark-coloured pants of some sort of light fabric and a shirt that seemed to float about his lithe form. A dancer’s attire, supple and unrestrictive.

He made up some light chatter to dispel the gloom, and she nodded, listened to the cadence of his laugh. She had her own words at the tip of her tongue, pushing at her closed lips, desperate. She wanted to ask him why behaved as so at the bakery; she wanted to ask if his heart was truly beyond repair, but those questions were too personal, hit too close. After Jongin’s impressive exhibition of his temper, she was afraid to lose him again.

They met sunlight at the end of their path, patched and golden. Jongin’s idle chatter trailed away in place of a sunny smile and he beckoned her close, announcing: “The Academy. A beauty, isn’t she?”

And he was right, for standing right before her, paint an immaculate white, gates wrought iron, grand, was Seoul’s Academy of Performing Arts. Although its compound was rather small, it made up for it by being absolutely imposing. It was composed of a small cluster of buildings, each five-storeys high, with windows that glowed of frequent upkeep. The design was elegant, railings and balconies, columns and glass.

The fee must be hell to pay, she thought to herself, slack-jawed.

Jongin smirked and let her gawk for a good minute before taking her lightly by the hand, pulling her through the gates. “Before everyone slips out for lunch,” he said conspiratorially, “let’s get on with that tour.”

He jogged to gates and she had to follow, his grip steady, firm over hers. He slipped into the crack of between the gates, waited for her to do the same, and led her through what she later learned was a labyrinthine maze of studios, staircases, and music rooms. The corridors were a bit small compared to her school’s, but they were promising, hidden secrets behind every corner.  

“The violinists,” he whispered to her, peering into the cracks of the blinds of a room’s glass window. “Insufferable show-offs sometimes; devils to sit with during lunch time; but overtly, ostentatiously, talented individuals.”

 She marvelled at them, the players, the sleek instruments of carved wood and their delicate, precious bows, slicing the air like whips. Jongin didn’t waste any time and quickly pulled her before she could recognise the song.

“Cellists. I like them best. They’re pleasant, mellow people, though there’s always a bad apple or two.” While the violinists electrified the air with their high wails, they shook the ground to its core, churning out dulcet, dependable notes.

Jongin pulled her forward again. “Pianists. Always out to outdo each other.”

“Flautists...”

“Guitarists…”

They filled the halls with stifled laughter and padding footsteps. Jongin danced about from glass to glass, sometimes on door, sometimes on window. He led her on with a bit of cheek, a shroud of mystery, and too many crooked smiles. He took her hand sometimes when they ascended stairs, drew her into doors that opened to wonders anew.

It was at one long corridor that he finally stopped, sobering. He smoothed down his hair with his long fingers. In one smooth gesture he brought his hand down to his lips, his jaw, then the back of neck, delaying the announcement. It was a long minute before he said, “The ballet studios.”

Jongin padded softly to one of the doors. She watched him go, and then followed, sliding beside him quietly.

Jongin pressed his palms onto the glass. He breathed onto it, swirled on it mists of fog. “Look.”

If she thought the others were beautiful in their emotional escape, then the ballet students were gorgeous in their execution. Arching necks of snow white, curved back fingers by shadows and bones; tulle tutus and en pointe shoes –all merely adornments to their art.

It took her a while to spot Jongin’s ballerina. Yeonjoo in her finery was a graceful being lost in the light. Transparent, thin, agile –she looked like she might vanish with every leap, every jete.

When Gayoon looked at Jongin again, his eyes had returned to its consuming, profound sadness. He held limp fingers to the glass, pressed in their tips, as though reaching for something unreachable.

“Could you do that?” she asked in a whisper, sidling nearer to him. Arabesques, chasses, glissades –arcs and lines, art and passion, dripping, searing patterns into the wood.

Jongin laughed, breathing another layer of fog onto the glass. “Yeah. I was okay, but I never felt… fulfilled after every performance. Ballet is precision and perfection. It’s control, a rein of grace. You leap and leap but you’re never free.” He bowed his head for a while; his lashes brushed against cheeks, showering into his eyes past memories. “But she loved it. Lived for it. I tried to hold on to her as ballet enslaved her, but she always slipped. I made her upset, begged for her time when could afford to give me none. I was desperate and tired, so very tired, at being second, and I told her. She said that if anyone wanted to love her, they’d have to know that her heart can’t be given whole, that half will always be lost to ballet.”

“Did she say that when she broke up with you?”

Jongin nodded slowly. “Yes. But I suppose the day I begged for some of her attention was the day I lost my half of her heart. She grew distant after that, kept me at an arm’s length.” He shrugged. “Maybe, sometime in that interlude, she found Baekhyun.”

His tale was hopelessly sorrowful; in his grief she could only afford him a hand, a palm into his, an anchor of warmth to ebb regret.

Jongin smiled at her, wry and bittersweet. He stood abruptly, pulling her, and seconds later was leading her away, not looking back. “Come on. I’ll show you my secret studio. A word of warning though: Sehun might be in, and I didn’t tell him I was bringing you.”

 “You’re sure he won’t get mad?”

“Nah,” Jongin shrugged, shooing her into a door that opened into a winding staircase. “He’d probably yell at me in some corner when he thinks you’re not listening, though.”

“He sounds absolutely charming.”

“Yes,” Jongin said airily. “As charming one of those snakes you see at the pet store, coiling around dead branches as it would necks.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say about a friend.”

Jongin smirked down at her from one step above, a phantom in this dark stairwell, shadows hugging him like a cloak. “I’m about 99.9% sure that he’ll say something embarrassing about me in front of you. I’ll sleep better knowing that I’d scored some points on him beforehand.”

He took her to a deserted corridor. Where in this perplexing realm of twining notes and elegant limbs she could not tell. All she knew was that they’d come to a door on which Jongin performed a complicated series of knocks, pressed his ear to listen, and creaked open.

He popped his head into the darkness and motioned her in. “We’re lucky. He’s not here.”

She slid around him. Her shoes bounced echoes against the walls. The scream of hinges desperate for oil rent a ribbon into the stillness. She stood still, disoriented, as Jongin’s soft, padding footsteps strayed away from her. He stopped. Light flooded the room, grazing mirror upon mirror and floors unpolished.

It was dank and stuffy, but had not the feel of abandonment. Though crowded with rails and rails of clothes pushed aside, it was suitably clean, decently kept, and appropriately homey.

“It used to be a costume room,” Jongin explained, coming to stand in the very middle, twirling in slow revolutions, arms out, motioning at everything it had. “From a long time ago. It was locked when I found it, unused. Sehun found the key and we’ve kept it a secret since.”

“It used to be darker,” he explained, watching her walk, trailing her fingers over the rails of clothes. “We scrimped up for some new lightbulbs and spent a good half of an afternoon replacing the old ones using a ladder we snuck out of the janitor’s closet. It’s nothing compared to the rest of the Academy, but it provides the valuable privacy that Sehun and I need.”

“Sehun,” she began, turning to face him. Over his shoulder she saw her face, reflected a thousand times over in the mirror. “You always mention him, and never anyone else, excepting Yeonjoo.”

His smile was doleful. “He’s the only person I trust here. He’s the only one who I know won’t drive knives into my back when I turn.”

The intensity with which his eyes held hers made her insides leap, her heart skip. She turned, hoped the mirror wouldn’t replicate her blush.

“I’m sorry.”

She spun, eyes wide. “For what?”

He raked his fingers through his hair. “That day in the bakery. I’m sorry if I seemed so cold.”

She seized this chance. “Why were you so mad?”

“Because….” His words trailed. A beat of silence, punctuated not long after when he shook his head. “Nothing. It’s just me being stupid.”

She opened to say something, to pry further, to know, but he’d already crossed the room, squatting at a corner. There was scuffling, plastic dragging across wood, and a silver boombox slid out of the small crevice, battered and old and stickered.

“Do you want to hear some music? I’ve plenty of tracks in my mp3 player.”

She crossed the room, bent over his shoulder. He looked up from his scrolling, blinking at her.

Jongin was uncannily, frustratingly, skilled at wiping clean his emotions.

“Do you have ballads? Not the super slow ones. Ones with a decent beat.”

“A lot.” He ran through titles, paused over one, and pressed play. The boombox crooned out voices and music foreign to the classical pieces favoured by the Academy.

They sat before the boombox, before the glass, with music welling between them. At first, they watched each other’s reflections; hers was a tumble of dark hair, fraying like silk at her shoulders, down her arms. Jongin, beside her, resembled a lost boy, his hands clasped, his shoulders hunched.

But sometime in the middle of the song, he broke eye contact from the mirror, and stood. Lightly, playfully, he began working in moves into the notes, coaxing limbs to embellish its rhythm. Then, it became serious choreography: legs cutting borders before the mirrors, arms ripping apart air.

She stood. He made circles around her.

Slide. Smirk. Limbs like water. Whirlpools for eyes, fixation on its tides. Bones dissolving into foam, weightless.

He took her hand, spun her, and then as suddenly as he’d come he drew away, sliding back into his orbit of circles around her.

Jongin was dancing with her as the centre point.

He was too fast. The mirrors around showed thousands of Jongins, thousands of circles. She had to twist to keep up, fearing that the wind would take him and the music dissolve him.

The door slammed open.

Jongin jerked to a stop, so abruptly that she thought the room had gone distorted. It was the sudden stillness that made her dizzy, the long silence that hitched breaths.

In the mirrors there was another boy, watching them. She turned and met his likeness: a handsome, broad-shouldered thing, hair the colour of dark earth, melting into black.

Jongin broke into an easy, careless smile. “Hey, Sehun.”

Sehun was staring at her as she did him. When Jongin spoke, his head snapped away, up, to look at him instead. His voice was deeper than she expected, wary.

“I didn’t know we had visitors.”

Jongin twisted in his heels, walking behind her. His hands cupped her shoulders, a friendly touch. “This is Seo Gayoon, my boss.”

She elbowed him in the ribs.

Jongin managed not to double over. Amusement grazed the corners of his lips. “Or more accurately, my new friend.”

Sehun stepped into the threshold, his movements slow, deliberate, a bit contemplative. He was carrying a duffel bag zipped only halfway, and he busied himself with tugging it for a good half a minute before he said, scepticism a practiced note to his tone, “Really Kkamjong?”

Jongin scowled. “Yes, you insensitive, unmannered dolt. Now be nice and say hello. God knows how long she’s been waiting.”

Sehun’s entrance had set her into a state of unease even from the very beginning, but she had to forgive him when he said, with a small smile that thawed ice and melted stones, “I’m Oh Sehun.”

“Hi.” She smiled politely at him, and when he bent to set down his bag, she turned her head up towards Jongin and whispered. “I think it’s time for me to leave.”

Jongin chuckled, deep and low. “If that’s what you want.”

“Oi, Rainbow Bunny. I’m walking her home.” He tossed something across the room. It jangled mid-air. Sehun caught the keys in his open palms. “Lock up and text me if you’re leaving and if you’re not, keep the door open because for God’s sake I’m tired of yelling over whatever bubblegum pop remix you’d probably have blasting in those speakers.”

Sehun looked ready for a good, equally patronising retort but Jongin had already steered her out of the door, slamming it in his face.

“I know its not my business and all but ‘Rainbow Bunny’?”

“Once upon a time, Oh Sehun was fool enough to give the vaguest instructions to a rookie hairdresser fresh out of cosmetology school. Paid the price for it –literally.” They reached the staircase, and Jongin held it open, waiting patiently for her to go in. “The bunny part is a cruel joke on my
part, after I learnt that girls thought he was ‘as cute as a rabbit’.”