Yeonhee was woken up far too early on Sunday morning by Mihae ringing.

“Where are you?” she demanded as Yeonhee rolled over in the luxurious bed and groggily tried to wake herself up.  “You owe me.  Kind of.”

“I do?”  Yeonhee sat up.

“I knocked on your door last night after I got back from that weird date thing you were scared to go on,” Mihae said, “but you weren’t there, so I thought I’d try again this morning.”

There was a pause.  Yeonhee winced.  Normally, if Mihae had something exciting to say, she would have blown straight through where or where not Yeonhee was in favour of getting to the juicy bits, but she did actually seem a bit concerned.

“I stayed overnight with my sister,” she lied.

“Oh, good,” Mihae said.  “See, I was a bit worried because you said the gifts were creeping you out, and since literally nothing happened at the show, I thought maybe this person might have followed you after all.”

It was not a possibility Yeonhee wanted to contemplate, but fortunately palace security was good.

“The actual show was really good,” Mihae went on.  “And I guess your hunch that this guy booked a ticket for the seat next to you was right, because I was second from the end of the row and that seat was empty pretty much the entire performance.  Looks like he wanted to sneak in once you were there or something.  I don’t know.  Possibly also means he realises I wasn’t you.”

Yeonhee made a mental note to tell Min, because she really didn’t like the prospect of that being true.  It was creepy.  At least nothing had happened to Mihae.

“You’re the best,” she said as a knock came on the door.  “Thank you.  I’ll pay you in chocolate.”

“Milk chocolate, please.  See you later!”

She hung up, and Yeonhee groaned at the prospect of getting out of bed to open the door.

“Come in!” she called out instead, pretty sure that it was going to be the prince.

It was.

“Do you want to come out for a run?” he asked her, popping his head around the door.  “The sun’s supposed to be rising in twenty minutes and it’ll look amazing over the lake.”

Yeonhee huddled into her duvet at the mention of exercise.

“Not running anywhere,” she mumbled, flopping back onto her pillows.

“We can walk, then,” he conceded.  “Get up and come see sunrise over the lake.”

He closed the door again, leaving Yeonhee with a choice between getting out of bed or standing him up.  She heaved herself out of bed.

Yixing was waiting in the hall outside her room when she emerged five minutes later, the taste of toothpaste still in .  His hands were tucked into the pockets of a puffer jacket and he had a light scarf around his neck.  Smiling, he helped her struggle into her coat and then offered her his arm as they set off through the quiet palace buildings.

So far, Yeonhee had only been out into the palace grounds once, but the lake was visible from some of the windows and Yixing had mentioned it a few times in connection with stories about growing up.  At the weekends, he and his father had gone netting for wildlife in and on the water, taking it out to put in large water-filled barrels while the king explained what all the different animals and insects were before they returned them to their natural habitat.  He’d crashed his first remote-controlled helicopter into it aged eight and cried and cried about it until his father had distracted him by making rockets out of water bottles for them to fire over the lake in an imitation military salute.  Apparently Jin Jia had fallen into it during a summer garden party, and Yixing had been ered into diving in after her and rescuing her after she’d spotted him on the shore nearby and pretended, with the help of her onlooking friends, that she couldn’t swim and was going to drown.

“It put me off her quite a bit,” Yixing confessed when Yeonhee for being a noble hero.  “I had a really bad crush on her growing up and it had taken quite a while to get over that, and then it felt like I’d just been let down.  Sort of like when you’ve just settled with the stage of reconciling yourself with the fact that your favourite celebrity isn’t perfect, and then a month later they get arrested for something pretty serious, I guess.”

Yeonhee was surprised at the flash of jealousy that raced through her at the admission that Yixing had ever liked anybody else.  She scuffed her toe moodily in the dirt.

Yixing turned questioningly towards her in the pre-dawn light, and she hastily tried to cover up.

“They were mentioning her at university when they were trying to figure out who your mystery girlfriend was,” she said.  “Apparently we both have moles in the right place.”

“Just below your left ear.”  Yixing smiled.  “It’s one of your charms.”

Blushing, she turned away.  The only sound for a few minutes after that was their feet crunching against the gravel path.

Yixing pulled Yeonhee to a halt as they reached the shores of the lake.  There was little wind, and it lay smooth and undisturbed, reflecting the shadows of the surrounding bushes and trees.  Yeonhee quietly mulled over the stories he’d told her as they stood there.  It was rare for him to mention – by name, at any rate – other people that he knew outside the palace.  Who were his friends?  She wasn’t even sure she knew.  Did he actually have any?

She was still figuring out if it was even worth asking something like that when he clasped her hand, raising it in his to point across the lake.

“Look,” he murmured.

A faint pink tinge was spreading across the water, and Yeonhee’s eyes instinctively passed beyond it to the horizon, where clouds were beginning to streak pink.  Yixing sat down, pulling her into his lap.

They watched in silence as the light spread.  Yixing had chosen a good day to watch the sunrise: it was still, but not completely clear, and the colours in the clouds as the sun peeped over the horizon ranged from pink to fiery orange and brighter still, driving the grey of the night back.  The lake in front of them blazed with colour, little ripples spreading here and there but the surface otherwise calm.

“One day,” Yixing mused eventually, “I want to be able to paint this.”

“I need to teach you how to use a brush,” Yeonhee agreed.  “Your sketching is getting pretty good now.”

He seemed chuffed.  “Thank you.  I had a good teacher.”

“Do I get a kiss for that?” Yeonhee wondered out loud.

Yixing scoffed fondly.  “Are you trying to turn our relationship into a student-teacher one?”

Yeonhee felt herself go scarlet.  “You know, Yixing, sometimes you’re a bit of a ert.  First there was that stuff with the live model and my sister and photos, and now you’re reading something very dirty into something completely innocent.”

“Well, you know what they say.”  He grinned mischievously at her.  “It’s the innocent ones you have to watch.”

“Clearly,” she mumbled.

He gave her a light peck on the nose and then turned to face out into the blinding sun as it rose.

“Kissing at sunset or dawn is very cheesy,” he told her.

“I like sunset kisses.”

“You kind of miss the sunset, though.  They make good photos, I guess.”

Yeonhee didn’t say it, in part because she didn’t like admitting it to herself, but one of the best dates she’d Taehyung had taken her on had wound up with them watching the sunset from the top of the tallest building in the city.  It had been maybe a few weeks after they’d started going out and that particular date had resulted in a lot of kissing.  She didn’t know whether it was a memory she wanted to forget or cherish.

Her stomach growled, breaking the silence.  Yixing patted her thigh, gesturing for her to get up.

“Breakfast time,” he deduced, slinging an arm around her and turning them around so that they could head back.

It was a very busy day once Yeonhee got back to the university.  There were fortunately no protesters to handle, but she had to ensure that everything for the talk was up to health and safety standards, particularly in reference to fire safety, and that they had absolutely everything they needed for the panel event that evening.  Sehun had ticketed it and Sowon was anxious to be sure that only those who had got the tickets were to be allowed in, which had meant getting campus security on board at the last minute.  Yeonhee dodged past her as she explained what they looked like in paper versions and on phones, hunting for Sehun.  He was busy with the soundboard for the event, while Namjoon was using duct tape to hold down wires safely.

A quick conversation with Sehun informed her that she needed to delegate people to be on hand to greet their six guests and bring them to a small reception room in the building next door, where Yeonhee would entertain them with drinks and nibbles for half an hour or so before the panel discussion actually started.  To her displeasure, Taehyung was also due to be hosting the drinks with her, since he’d been responsible for inviting three of the guests.  Yeonhee wondered if there was any way she could ditch, or arrange for Taehyung to be delayed in a locked broom cupboard.

All too soon, the event was actually upon them, and she had to stop smoothing down the front of her dress as the first of the six panelists arrived.  She was a petite Hanmi woman who Yeonhee vaguely recognised as a professor of political science from the top Hanmi-only university in the country, which was based a few cities over.  Thankful that Taehyung was still not yet there, Yeonhee engaged the professor in smalltalk until the next person arrived.

She was much more in her comfort zone when Kwon Jiyong stepped into the room, because he was one of the main representatives of the republican movement and Yeonhee had met him many times before.  After they had exchanged pleasantries, she introduced him to the professor and then stepped back to poke her head out of the door, not wanting to hover uncomfortably.  She instantly wished she hadn’t, since Taehyung was making his way over with three more of the panelists, and she really didn’t want to deal with him just yet, but she knew she was going to have to it up sooner or later, and “later” at best was going to be in under a minute.  Fixing a smile onto her face, she ducked back into the room.

Moments later, Taehyung and the three panelists that he must have invited stepped into the room.  Taehyung himself was rather dashingly dressed in well cut trousers and a shirt and extremely expensive-looking jumper.  It was the sort of outfit Yeonhee had come to expect to see on Yixing on a regular basis, and she tried not to grimace.  On his best behaviour, Taehyung introduced her to the Zenyu lawyer and the Zenyu journalist and political commentator and the Hanmi constitutional lawyer and theorist before beating Yeonhee at her own game and introducing them all to the two panelists already there.  Just as he was allowing them to mingle, Jiawei appeared briefly with the final panelist, a Hanmi journalist Yeonhee had met a few times before and who she knew to be something of a monarchist, and then they were left with ten minutes before they needed to go over to the hall.  All of the guests were happily talking to each other, and Yeonhee allowed herself to pick up a glass of orange juice, figuring it was best not to disturb them.

Taehyung joined her.

“You look extremely pretty tonight,” he said as he poured himself a glass of water.  Surprised, Yeonhee looked over at him.

He was smiling at her, subtly, but in an unguarded manner.

“That dress looks really good on you,” he added before holding up the jug.  “Water?”

This was one of the reasons she’d originally dated him.  He was always frank and sincere with his compliments, and he’d never shied away from actually giving them.

“Ah. . .  No thanks,” she mumbled, pointing to her orange juice.  He shrugged and set the water jug down before turning and leaning against the table, imitating the position that Yeonhee was already in.

“Do you think tonight’s going to go well?” he asked.  “Everybody’s been putting a lot of effort into it.  It’s bigger than anything we usually do.”

“Hopefully,” Yeonhee mumbled.

“You should be fine, though, you’ve moderated panels before.”

“Mm.”  It didn’t stop Yeonhee from being nervous, not to mention that the compliment was actually kind of needed at that moment to bolster her nerves.

Jihae slipped into the room at that moment, clutching a camera, and she hurried over to them.

“I need to take some promotional photos,” she said.  “Sehun asked since we haven’t updated the ones on the website in ages and this is probably going to be our biggest event of the year.  Plus we can’t have all of them being photos of protests.”

“True,” Yeonhee agreed.

Jihae immediately backed off a couple of steps, raising the camera to her face.  “All right, then!  Let me get one of you both looking fabulous to kick it off before I ask the panelists.”

Yeonhee put on her best camera grimace.

“Taehyung, put down your glass and stand a bit closer to her,” Jihae ordered.  “That’s better – no, closer, you both look really awkward with a gap like that – okay.”

Taehyung’s arm carefully circled Yeonhee’s waist, and he removed the glass of orange juice from her hand to place on t