Sooyoung thinks it’s been a long time coming. “You know,” she starts lightly, sitting at the small kitchen table while Seulgi’s filling her cup with water. Sooyoung says it like her only dating experience wasn’t on a variety show that paid celebrities to act like they were married, and that she didn’t say aren’t we so good at acting? every time the five of them gathered around their small television set to watch the broadcasts. “Sometimes the only way to solve things is by making out.”

Seulgi promptly spits out her water, to which Sooyoung feigns innocence.

Seungwan thinks that Seulgi’s overreacting. “I mean,” she says calmly, once Seulgi’s done blurting out what happened earlier that day, the lights off in their shared bedroom and both of them tucked beneath their covers. The heater hums in the would-be silence of Seungwan searching for the right words, eloquently, while Seulgi feels like her tongue’s in knots. “If he kissed back, then I think he likes you.”

Leave it to Seungwan to be rational about the whole thing. Seulgi feels like she’s been worrying over nothing. And then: “You guys basically flirt every week on public television anyway. Like, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ended up being ninety-nine percent real, ‘cause you’re a terrible actor and can't fake that stuff to save your life .”

Also leave it to Seungwan to make the whole thing worse.

Joohyun thinks that they should talk about it. “Over text?” Seulgi yelps incredulously once Joohyun hands her back her phone, with KakaoTalk pulled up on the screen. Joohyun covers her ears a bit at Seulgi’s outburst.

“I guess email would work, too,” Joohyun says, slightly miffed. Seulgi guesses that’s how Joohyun stays friends with Solar without missing a cleaning day at the dorm.

Yerim, who’s sitting near them doing her homework, thinks studying is more important, for once. “Shh,” she shushes, without looking up. “I’m trying to finish this math problem,” like Seungwan didn’t send her a video of Yerim and Sooyoung watching one of her episodes in the van on their way to some recording screaming kiss, kiss, kiss! to the small phone screen. Yerim totally had to be invested in her love life.

Seulgi just groans, curling up as if it’ll help her disappear and take this whole situation away with her existence, and wonders how it all came to this.

The story starts like this –

Every variety program that Seulgi becomes a fixed member on tanks.

It’s not like Seulgi guests on a lot of shows by herself, but it’s also not like she doesn’t go on any shows at all. When she thinks back to 2015, what Seulgi remembers the most is their first win with “Ice Cream Cake,” and spending most of her days practicing with Seungwan in the recording studio, working out with Seungwan in the nearby gym, and lazing around the dorm with Seungwan when they weren’t doing either of those things, waiting for the rest of their members to get back from their activities. Seulgi didn’t really mind – she didn’t train for seven years to become a variety darling, and she didn’t have an instant likeability about her (Yerim), or a super charming personality (Sooyoung), or a face so pretty that people would want to keep watching (Joohyun).

Instead, Seulgi has Seungwan, and their late night trips to eat patbingsoo in the summer when their manager isn’t paying attention.

The problem is, the company wants to make her a thing. So they stick her on shows that sound good in production, but never work out in practice (see: said shows’ ratings) – they pull her out from Girls Who Eat Well after the first episode because of all the negative feedback and Idol Drama Royalty airs the two episodes they pre-recorded before shutting down all together because no one except their groups’ die-hard fans were watching it (which translates to nowhere near enough people).

“I’m cursed,” Seulgi jokes to Seungwan one evening when they’re walking back to the dorm from the company building, hoods over their hair, the sun an egg yolk dropping into the depths of the colbalt horizon, cicadas crying in the trees. Summer’s just about to start, the heat with it, and Seulgi wonders if Seungwan will be in the mood for patbingsoo soon.

“What do you mean?” Seungwan says, furrowing her eyebrows. It’s a little different for Seungwan, Seulgi guesses. Seungwan got to sing a song for Lee Minho’s new drama recently, and while it wasn’t the main theme, the drama itself was proving to be insanely popular, which meant that most people knew the soundtrack.

Seulgi pulls the sleeves of her hoodie over her hands and hides her fists inside them. “To be unemployed until our next comeback,” she says, kicking at a rock on the street. It falls into a gutter.

“Seulgi,” Seungwan frowns, a warning creeping into her voice. They’ve had this conversation enough times for Seulgi to know where it usually ends. “That’s not your fault, you know.” She loops her arm into Seulgi’s. “You’ve just been unlucky.”

Seulgi sighs. Seungwan believed in horoscopes and that kind of stuff enough to use luck as a plausible answer, but Seulgi wasn’t so convinced. “I know,” she singsongs, regretting bringing up the subject now. She can still feel Seungwan’s wary gaze while she punches in the code for the gate of their building. Seungwan gets distracted by a mosquito bite on her ankle once they kick off their shoes at the entry way, leaving Seulgi to mope by herself about being left in the dust while the rest of her members were succeeding.

Two days later, a We Got Married filming shows up on her schedule under the fifteenth. Seulgi squints at the message from their manager, half-awake, the sheets covering her legs pushed to the side, air conditioner silent, before Yerim thunders down the hallway with Joohyun chasing after her, pushing what looks like a container of fruit into her backpack while calling, “Unnie says you have a meeting tomorrow, Seulgi-yah!”

When Seulgi finally comes to, it’s when she’s brushing her teeth. Lo and behold, said meeting is also there on her schedule.

A fleck of toothpaste hits her phone screen.

Idols go on We Got Married for a select few reasons:

a) They’re popular and are continuing to ride their wave of popularity (BTOB’s Sungjae, ZE:A’s Kwanghee).
b) No one knows them and their company sticks them on the show to get known (Madtown’s Jota. Sooyoung).
c) They’re no longer relevant to the public but are trying to remain so (CNBLUE’s Jonghyun).
d) They have nothing better to do (her).

Seulgi knows where she stands in this list of reasons. She doesn’t, however, quite know where Kim Sungjoo factors in.

These are the things Seulgi knows about Sungjoo (after an hour of searching his name on Naver in the dark of her and Seungwan’s room, Seungwan already deep asleep):

a) They’re both born in the same year, and in the same month. His birthday is less than a week apart from hers, and it’s a pretty freaky coincidence.
b) He does more activities in China than he does in Korea.
c) He was in Sooyoung’s drama (this she already knew from both watching said drama and from asking Sooyoung what Sungjoo was like over a bowl of watermelon several nights ago. The windows had been open, cicadas chirping loudly, and Sooyoung didn't mull over it much, carefully examining her watermelon cube before saying, "He's nice, I guess."

Seulgi laughed even though some part of her brain felt a little fuzzy. "What does that mean?"

Sooyoung shook her head. Seungwan reached over both their shoulders to stab a piece of watermelon with her toothpick. "We didn't talk much, but he seems like a good guy," she elaborated. Swatted away Yerim's foot prodding into her side. "Polite to the staff."

"Oh," Seulgi said. She tried not to think about it for the next few days.)
d) He’s almost a head taller than her, and his left eye is narrower than his right. He laughs when she finds him sitting on a bench once she steps off the train, three cameras surrounding him and a bouquet of yellow roses in his hands. They’re in hers when Seulgi notices how his grin is a little lopsided and boyish, eyes sparkling like he knows a joke she’s never heard before.

The way that We Got Married works is that there’s a general trajectory of each couple’s relationship that the staff lays out, a few key lines and actions per episode, and the rest is just, well. Improvisation. It’s Seulgi’s weakness, not knowing how exactly to get from point A to point B, and the way Sungjoo trips over himself to drape his jacket over her legs when she takes a seat beside him already sets her heart off traitorously in her chest.

“Did you wait for a long time?” Seulgi asks when they run out of introductions, Sungjoo’s flannel soft against her knees. A summer rain pelts onto the awning above them and some of the staff have umbrellas shielding themselves from the downpour, like flowers turning their faces to the sky. Sungjoo leans back, shoulders broad in his t-shirt, and Seulgi lets herself think that he’s handsome, despite spending most of her career surrounded by ridiculously good-looking people.

“Yes,” he replies lightly and Seulgi lowers her head purposefully, feeling guilty for catching the wrong train for their mission card not once, but twice. “But it’s ok,” she hears him laugh. She looks over to him again and their eyes meet. “My wife’s here now,” he says, direct and earnest and Seulgi’s pretty sure she never saw that in the script.

Seulgi squawks in embarrassment, caught off-guard, and Sungjoo’s broad shoulders just shake in laughter, like this was the joke he meant to tell her. The rain hits the pavement, light like the way he breathes in between chuckling, and a thorn from the bouquet she didn’t even realize she was clutching so tightly prods at her fingertip. Seulgi thinks that if this was any place else, under different circumstances, maybe she could fall in love with him.

Instead, she laughs, watching the rain, and does her best to pretend.

Seulgi’s first love was a boy with perfect teeth named Kang Dongjin.

They’d met a couple months after Seulgi started training, seeing each other during dance lessons (he was still in the beginner class even though he’d joined a year before Seulgi had) and during monthly group performances. Now that Seulgi thinks about it, he was hopelessly mediocre at both singing and dancing and nowhere near the top in terms of looks, but the Seulgi of then had watched him with almost a tunnel-like vision and whenever their eyes happened to meet, he’d smile at her and send her stomach into somersaults.

She’d liked Dongjin for reasons she didn’t like other people – didn’t train hard enough, didn’t stay behind after lessons to ask the vocal teacher how to reach that high note, smiled instead of biting his lip when the teacher berated him for messing up while playing the accompaniment for Soojung on the piano. It was fascinating to her when she’d peer over his shoulder at the worksheets that were littered across the dance floor during their ten minute breaks in between lessons and his eyes would light up, gladly explaining some algebra concept that Seulgi hadn’t learned about in class yet, or maybe dozed off during. It was fascinating because Seulgi, along with everyone else, put training first and school at a one point five in the place behind it, while Dongjin had it the other way around.

“I wanna be a doctor someday,” Dongjin said one day when they were walking to the bus stop. Seulgi remembers it was sometime in the winter, her worn-down sneakers leaving dirt tracks in the white snow they cut across. “What about you?” he’d asked, eyes shining.

Seulgi laughed. “A singer,” she deadpanned, as if it wasn’t already obvious.

Dongjin furrowed his eyebrows at that. “You know you’re not gonna be a singer forever, right?” Instead of feeling hurt at his words, Seulgi clicked her tongue dismissively at the stop light.

It wasn’t a surprise when Dongjin told her he was leaving to focus on school the week after she didn’t make the line-up for f(x). They hadn’t been anything more than friends, but Seulgi's nose burned and her heart dismantled, rearranging itself in such a way that her chest felt tight, out of sorts with where everything should’ve been. “I’ll see you on tv someday,” he’d smiled with those perfect, even teeth, promiseless. Seulgi smiled back and pretended that she didn’t want to cry.

It hadn’t been a reciprocated first love, nor really an unrequited one. It felt more like Seulgi running around with the heart on her sleeve hidden under several layers of winter coats, and when she finally overheated and pulled all those layers off, the heart she’d sown on wasn’t among them. Only the thought that it possibly existed lingered in her memory, and it would haunt her every now and then about where it disappeared to.

Sometimes Seulgi thinks about Dongjin whenever she walks past cram schools or the dance studio rooms that he used to spread his homework out on. When she’s asked about her first love on random radio shows, she claims she never had one, remembering how crying over Dongjin felt a lot like crying over nothing.

Today, she thinks about him in front of the small tv set at the dorm, Yerim’s head cutting into her vision of the screen after she abandoned her homework for a glimpse of Seulgi’s virtual love life. Anytime else, Seulgi would gladly push her way through her members, flopping over Seungwan’s legs to get a better view of the show. This time, seeing a close up of her reaching for the space between her and Sungjoo for his fingers, pressing her tentative palm against his large one (one of their missions during the first filming) – Seungwan, Sooyoung, and Yerim are screaming while Joohyun keeps her eyes fixed to the screen, the most engrossed in a tv program Seulgi’s ever seen her be – Seulgi kind of just wants to run out of the dorm and down the stairs and out to the street, evening cicadas crying in the trees, and never look at a tv again.

They’d filmed twice already since that first meeting – once at the Han River (one of the things Sungjoo wrote down on his "want to do on the show" list) and once with Seulgi visiting Sungjoo backstage during a magazine shoot he was at with his fellow member, Wenhan, with a lunchbox she’d made in the dorm with Seungwan’s help (one of the things Seulgi wrote down on hers, even though she was usually too lazy to cook, which Seungwan had graciously informed the camera) – but seeing the finished product, edited and all, was an entirely different beast. Random expressions that Seulgi doesn’t even remember making are zoomed in on and aptly placed to make it all seem like a cute, shy first meeting when in reality, all Seulgi remembers is an awkward tumbling over words (her) and generous pity laughter (Sungjoo), their palms uncomfortably sticky together. She suddenly understands the time Sooyoung had laughed so hard that she snorted at some close-up of Sungjae's face during a run of one of their episodes and without much explanation, she'd yelled, "I have to tell Sungjae oppa that this cut made it in!" before fiercely typing into her phone.

Her own phone vibrates against her knee then, giving her an excuse to look away from the screen. It’s a few texts from Sungjoo, and they’re the first he’s ever sent her since they exchanged numbers when the cameras were off at his photoshoot.

“I think it’d be good if we got each other’s numbers,” Sungjoo had smiled down at her, wiping his wet hair with a towel. He just had to be so goddamned tall. He and Wenhan had finished their last shots before the break in a bathtub, and Sungjoo had changed into a new shirt, but his pants were still sopping wet, leaving a puddle of water at his feet. It was one of the weirder photoshoots Seulgi had seen but well. Art. “Since we’re friends now?”

Seulgi blinked, still thinking about the nearly-burnt egg rolls she put in her own lunchbox. The more successful second batch had went into Sungjoo’s, and she'd been wondering if there was a way to hide the blackened bottoms while she ate them across from him. Friends. Sungjoo. This was a fake marriage. Right. “Okay,” she said without much of a second thought, handing him her phone and he smiled that charming lopsided smile of his.

The joke this time was him saving his own contact as Seulgi’s good looking husband Kim Sungjoo. Seulgi had almost dropped her phone, flustered when he laughed lightly at her reaction, like getting her to blush was all a game to him even when the camera wasn’t on. Wenhan, who’d been passing by, wiggled his eyebrows at them which just made everything worse.

Seulgi frowns, opening the messages. There’s three of them, sent in quick succession:

from: Seulgi's good looking husband Kim Sungjoo
are you watching the broadcast right now, wife ~ ?
my members are laughing at me ㅜㅜ
this is so embarrassing

Seulgi can feel a smile on her lips as she types back.

yes, kim sungjoo-ssi
my members are so concentrated on the tv. i think it’s worse than being laughed at

from: Seulgi's good looking husband Kim Sungjoo
"husband"
i can’t believe we have to sit through this every week

i’m not gonna watch any of the other episodes if it’s going to be this embarrassing. Sooyoung, Yerim, and Seungwan are squealing again over something, and Seulgi doesn’t want to know about it.

from: Seulgi's good looking husband Sungjoo
yeah
they edit it to make it look so real ㅋㅋ

Seulgi pauses. haha yeah, she types, but her fingers suddenly feel lethargic and heavy.

Sungjoo’s next reply comes after a few minutes. ok, i have to go now. see you next week seulgi! ^_^

Seulgi stares at it for a moment before sighing and locking her phone screen. Joohyun looks away from the tv screen to glance at Seulgi flopping onto her back, phone on her face, before redirecting her attention back to the Seulgi on television. Virtual Seulgi is walking on the inside of the street, away from incoming traffic, with her husband, Virtual Sungjoo, by her side, while Real Seulgi is laying on the floor of her dorm’s living room – thinking about how Real Sungjoo went back and changed the contact name she saved herself as on his phone (just Kang Seulgi) to Sungjoo’s pretty wife Seulgi – and wondering what’s really real and what’s just for show, an idea she can’t quite grasp like one of those algebra concepts Dongjin’s eyes had sparkled over all those years ago.

She wonders if he’s watching her on tv right now.

It was Sooyoung who told her a lot of things about the show.

"You've gotta separate what's tv and what's reality," she'd said the first time, unprecedented, flopping her stomach over Seulgi's toes on the edge of her bed right when she was on the precipice between consciousness and dreams, and it shook her awake. "Half of it's an act and sometimes you don't wanna pretend, but you just have to."

Seulgi blinked for a few seconds, the drowsiness still caught in the corners of her eyes. "Then what's the other half of it?" she yawned out. Sooyoung put her hands under her chin, blowing half-hearted raspberries into the air absentmindedly. She dug her knees into Seulgi's shins over the covers and pulled herself back up, opting for sitting cross-legged instead, still over Seulgi's toes.

"You pretending that it's not pretend," Sooyoung finally decided, slowly and carefully. She pat Seulgi roughly on the cheek and Seulgi just stuck her tongue out in retaliation. Sooyoung laughed at that, but her eyes looked wary in the dim lighting. "You just gotta be careful, alright?"

Sooyoung and Sungjae don't really talk. By "don't really," they mean "not at all," and logically, it makes sense to Seulgi - even backstage at music shows before Sooyoung's run ended, all that really connected her to Sungjae was a shared fatigue and annoyance at some of the stints the producers scripted into the show. That mutual understanding had fizzled out a few weeks after their last episode ran, and by the time they finally saw each other again when year-end shows started rolling around, Sooyoung was back to the same stilted greeting and one-minute how have you been? conversations that Seulgi imagined exes who decided not stay friends had under unfortunate circumstances.

Seulgi wonders whether that’ll be her and Sungjoo in a year or so as he holds his mouth open expectantly when she scoops a heaping spoonful of strawberry ice cream. She scrunches her nose, mock-annoyed because she just fed him, but obliges for the cameras.

They’re at an amusement park today, wearing matching headbands with obnoxiously red bows on them (Seulgi dragged Sungjoo into the store and he caved after she used her nonexistent aegyo on him). The late summer sun is still persistent and bright, and Seulgi’s slightly worried her legs are going to burn even though they’re stopping for more touch-ups and breaks than usual.

A few hours ago, Sungjoo had reached over and wiped away a bead of sweat that had trailed to her neck with the back of his hand. Seulgi hadn’t said anything but her heart had traitorously started up at that. Sungjoo hadn’t said anything back, but she could tell he wanted some kind of loving gesture in return. Her brain overheated trying to come up with something as they waited in line for the rollercoaster the staff told them to ride, the one Sungjoo had stared at with eyes full of childish excitement.

In the end, she held onto his arm for the whole ride, her hair whipping around them, but that wasn’t even planned. So now they’re sitting at a bench, and all that’s left of Seulgi’s ice cream is the melted remains.

Sungjoo is competitive, Seulgi’s figured out from the past month and a half they’ve been filming. He says things like he’s always joking, and he treats their back-and-forth like a game. He usually wins, getting Seulgi to blush or stutter right when she’s delivering whatever lines she’s scripted to say, but the few times that Seulgi wins, he outdoes her with something cheesier. Seulgi’s pretty sure the staff loves him for making their job easier.

On the other hand, it makes Seulgi’s job harder. She keeps unfolding and refolding the boundaries between what’s real and what’s fake until the paper is filled with horizontal lines all the way down and her fingertips feel full of static. She’s almost afraid she’ll shock Sungjoo when she ends up reaching for his hand.

But whenever Seulgi wins, Sungjoo just laughs like he’s breathless and she’s too much for him, and it makes her heart swell like when she holds a trophy Red Velvet’s won on a music show or when she’s performing on a stage so large that she looks like an ant from the furthest seats away. It makes her want to win over and over and over again, and even though she’s not straightforward like Sooyoung, extremely talented like Seungwan, alarmingly beautiful like Joohyun, or as bubbly as Yerim, it gives Seulgi the momentary thrill that she’s enough with her no-fun jokes and roundabout sentences and slightly salty egg rolls.

“What now?” Sungjoo says, stretching out his legs. “Ah,” he stops, suddenly as they start walking again. Seulgi looks back at him, up at him, and time stops. A cheesy smile spreads on his face. “Pretty,” he finishes, and then everything starts back up into motion once more.

Seulgi laughs, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “Thank you,” she says, grabbing his hand and pulling them both forward, to the arcade. She hears Sungjoo’s tell-tale laugh behind her, breathless.

“But you like him,” Seungwan says in the car on the way home as Seulgi’s putting her earbuds in her ears.

“Huh?” Seulgi says, scrolling through playlists on her phone. Among them, there’s one with only two songs on it – one that Sungjoo sang to her through the phone as a clue during their first mission, the other the one Sungjoo played for her the day the moved into their “newlywed house.” Her finger flies past that one.

Seungwan sighs. “We get along well,” she says, doing her best imitation of Seulgi’s voice. It’s the answer Seulgi gave on Kiss the Radio when Hongki asked her how married life was going on their short segment. “It’s nice to be on the show with a friend my own age.”

Seulgi frowns, confused. “What does that have to do who liking who?” Seungwan looks at Seulgi like Seulgi’s missing a few screws in her thought process. “They’ve only aired two of our ‘dates,’” she uses her fingers to punctuate the word. “I can’t really say anything else?”

“I just think,” Seungwan starts. Seungwan had been the one to tell her that being a part of the show was a privilege. She said it with a far away look in her eyes, sighing dreamily. "I mean," she told Seulgi during the car ride home the day the news of her joining the cast was supposed to go public. "You can date in front of the whole nation! Without people getting angry! How amazing is that?"

Seulgi thought about that, along with what Sooyoung had constantly told her. "I don't know," she frowned, pressing her lips together. "None of it's real?"

"Psh," Seungwan waved away. "You gotta be more optimistic about it, Seulgi-yah!" Count on Seungwan to be ever the romantic. "It doesn't have to be that way."

Seulgi hums, waiting for her to continue. Maybe she should’ve taken the chance to send Sungjoo a cringe-worthy video message and see how he took that. She hadn’t thought about it until now. “You like him,” Seungwan concludes then, looking over at Seulgi expectantly.

Of course Virtual Seulgi liked Sungjoo. She initiated on-screen hand holds and leaned her head against Sungjoo’s shoulder when she was tired from a long day of filming on the bus ride back, answered when he got into the habit of calling her 老婆¹, and told the camera that her heart fluttered when he stared intently at her face while brushing a fallen eyelash off her cheek in her one-on-one interview. But Virtual Seulgi was the one behind the television screen, not the one sitting next to Seungwan in the car, and that’s what comforted Seulgi late at night whenever she was afraid that her heart beating faster and faster in Sungjoo’s presence was something of herself and not the show.

Seulgi in the van contemplates Seungwan’s words. Had she talked about Sungjoo often recently? Or had Seungwan noticed that she was always texting Sungjoo during broadcasts of their episodes now, a laugh escaping her lips every now and then at a particularly funny comment he made? “It’s a show,” she dismisses. She doesn’t know why she hears disbelief in her own voice. “It’s just a show,” Seulgi repeats again, more firm this time.

Seungwan presses her lips together like she’s physically exerting herself to keep what she wants to say inside. “Right,” she just says, nodding her head. Seulgi turns away from her then, looking out the window. Instead of a gaping darkness of night, she sees her own face reflected back at her, and it tells her that Seungwan knows something she doesn’t.

Sungjoo gets bolder starting in the fall. He drags her down with him when he collapses onto their bed after a long day at work and she yelps, off-balance. When he visits her and her members practicing for a special stage for the Hallyu Dream Concert, he gives into Sooyoung and Yerim’s chants for them to kiss by pecking her on the cheek, feather-light and barely there, before falling over in embarrassment (Seulgi’s sure that Sooyoung’s enjoying her chance at revenge, after Seulgi and Seungwan ganged up on her and Sungjae back then). Seulgi’s brain actually short-circuits and all she can do in front of the camera is laugh and smile and try her best to keep her heart from beating out of her chest.

It gets harder and harder for Seulgi to try to one-up everything Sungjoo does, but he concedes some breathless laughter to her anyway, even when she doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t really feel like winning, and she starts struggling through recordings, frustrated that she can’t keep up.

On the other side of the coin, the viewers love them. Ratings go up and stay up and it’s the first time Seulgi’s drawn so much attention through a variety show. More gigs start showing up on her schedule – a girl group special corner on Weekly Idol with Twice’s Nayeon, Lovelyz’s Mijoo, now-disbanded-I.O.I’s Sohye, and Laboum’s Solbin, individual appearances on Happy Together and Hello Counselor, and a special hosting of M!Countdown with Sungjoo.

But if anything, Sungjoo’s popularity soars. He gets scheduled for more appearances than Seulgi does on variety programs, starts hosting M!Countdown permanently with Lee Haeun, the girl who played his love interest in Sooyoung’s drama, and their recording schedule for We Got Married starts to bend around his. Where were they hiding such a handsome face, are what most of the comments online say along with the likes of he’s so likeable and funny.

And of course, there are the comments from the people online who hate them, but Seulgi doesn’t really bother with those.

Seulgi’s not surprised. Sungjoo’s the loud one between them two – the affectionate and noisy one to her, more curled into herself but still receptive to all his too-loud declarations. He knows how to be funny but knows just as well how to be sincere, and Seulgi, who knows how to portray neither of those things in thirty-minute time blocks, knows that at the momentum he’s at, he’ll be a big name soon.

It’s the story that every idol wants – to rise from obscurity to fame – and maybe that’s why Sungjoo kept pushing and pushing with her, in order to keep whatever the show had going for him going. Sungjoo really deserves it, truly deserves it, but sometimes Seulgi catches herself wishing things were like they were when she first stepped off the train in June, Sungjoo waiting for her. Now it feels a lot like Sungjoo’s on the train, but Seulgi never gets to the bench in time to catch him when he gets off at the stop where she’s supposed to be waiting for him.

“Hey,” he says one day when Seulgi’s lost in thought. The staff are starting to pack things up and when Seulgi looks down, there’s still the shirt she was folding before the recording ended in her hands. She smooths it into its place in the closet – their closet, Virtual Seulgi and Virtual Sungjoo’s – placing it next to the couple shirts they bought on their second date. “Good job today.”

Seulgi shuts the closet door with a bitter laugh. She doesn’t really remember what they did today, only remembers the last part of it – her folding the laundry and him hanging up the clothes in the, their, living room – and it’s so much like helping Joohyun back at the dorm that she loses her sense of direction for a second. Suddenly, she wants to be in her and Seungwan’s room, buried under her comforter with the lights shut off, telling Seungwan how horrible filming went. Instead, Sungjoo follows her out of the, their – she forgets again – their bedroom, looking at her with those uneven eyes of his.

“Not really,” Seulgi lets herself say, inundated with a sudden guilt. Sungjoo had to initiate all their scripted actions today, after Seulgi kept blanking. “I’ll do better next time,” she promises.

“Seulgi,” Sungjoo says. She looks up at him from her slippers – the ones they chose from the furniture store together, with the cherries on them, Seulgi’s favorite fruit isn’t even cherries – and the lopsided grin that’s usually on his face is noticeably absent. It’s different and Seulgi doesn’t know what to do other than stand there. “You were great today,” he tells her with a sincerity that he’s never had with her before, and Seulgi wonders why Sungjoo’s doing this now instead of in front of the cameras.

Her heart pounds in her ears, vibrating to her toes like the bass of their new possible comeback song. “Thanks,” she replies in the absence of everything else – the cameras that should document something like this and tuck it away for their onscreen narrative, a come back that would trick Sungjoo into thinking she’s doing her best for the show. The boundary between what’s reality and what’s meant for the show.

You like him, Seungwan’s all-knowing voice comes to mind. I don’t, when Sungjoo pats her on the shoulder and tells her to get some rest, because she needs it. I really don’t, as she watches him go around, thanking the staff members one-by-one before leaving.

Does it really matter if she likes him anyway?

They start seeing each other less and less once both of them start preparing for their group’s comebacks. Seulgi sends Sungjoo a congratulatory message when he texts her about it at three in the morning one night, her fingers sticky with sweat against her phone screen from practicing their dance routine for hours. It’s what all this was for – the show, the MC-ing gig, the other variety show appearances – and Seulgi remembers how he closed his eyes while singing for her, lost in the music, and how his eyes lit up describing his group members and she’s happy for him.

She doesn’t get a reply text but forgets that they even had this conversation until Sungjoo shows up while she's shooting jacket photos for Red Velvet's album and she hears Yerim scream it’s brother-in-law! His eyes are tired, but when they high-five, there’s still that lopsided grin on his face.

“Your hair,” he starts once they’re alone, the cameras still on them. Joohyun’s shooting her individual shots now, and Seulgi’s pretty sure everyone else is napping in the dressing room while they can. Her own eyes are burning. “It’s different.”

“Oh,” Seulgi echoes. She touches the ends of it – it’s dark red now, not bright enough that she needed bleach against her scalp, but not the black that she had when they first started filming for the show – and realizes that they haven’t seen each other in a month other than over their television sets. “Yeah,” she says, dumbly, and her cheeks flame after the word leaves her lips.

Sungjoo laughs. It’s familiar and warm and Seulgi thinks she might’ve missed it. “I like it,” he says, and he’s looking at her with that sincerity again – the same sincerity of the last time they saw each other. Seulgi still doesn’t know how to respond.

When he asks her to talk about the song they’re going to promote, Seulgi releases a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. “Sing your part for me,” Sungjoo prods with that teasing grin again, and things go back to normal, except Seulgi keeps thinking about the seriousness in his eyes and wonders if this is all just a new part of the game they’ve been playing for months now.

Sungjoo’s still there when Seulgi takes her photos, watching with an intense focus that makes her nervous, and he’s still there after she’s done, surrounded by the rest of her members in the dressing room, because he brought them all coffee (so that’s why he suspiciously texted her, asking what everyone’s favorite drink was). “It’s nice to have a brother-in-law,” Yerim says, and Seulgi feels Sungjoo’s laugh from her shoulder that’s touching his, squished together on the tiny loveseat in the corner. His foot nudges hers playfully and Seulgi’s heart thunders as she nudges it back.

Seungwan mouths something to her that Seulgi doesn’t quite catch but gets the gist of. In short, Seulgi wants to die.

There’s always some kind of point that everything builds up to and then crashes around. It’s in movies (the ), in songs (the bridge). In Jenga. It’s probably a concept in physics or something too, but studying had never been Seulgi’s strong suit. She probably just wanted to believe there existed a physical law that explained how she single-handedly destroyed things for herself. Like in Jenga.

It starts with UNIQ’s comeback choreography. Seulgi visits Sungjoo one night for their We Got Married filming, and Seungyoun insists that they show her what they’ve been practicing.

“No!” Sungjoo whines, already acting purposefully sulky from how the rest of the members crowded around Seulgi as soon as she entered their studio, eager to defame him with sleep talking stories.

“But I want to see it,” Seulgi says, laughing. It’s in their script for the week. Sungjoo eventually concedes because I like you, he tells Seulgi with a toothy grin and the camera doesn’t catch the way her heart stops before starting again, beating painfully loud.

Seulgi wishes she listened to Sungjoo, because she forgot how UNIQ’s choreography was for their last comeback almost three years ago now – the last time she watched the music video was when she searched Sungjoo on Naver, four months ago – and she has to hide behind her hands when the ab-flashing starts. Sungjoo makes eye contact with her for the whole thing and Seulgi wants to break apart the floorboards and dig herself a hole.

“It’s…” she starts when they all look at her expectantly after they’re done, breathing hard, Sungjoo hiding behind Yixuan and Wenhan, only his eyes peeking out. “It’s definitely y,” she says hopelessly, because there’s no other way to describe it. She knows the staff will ask her about it during the individual interview later.

As a consolation, Yibo and Seungyoun dance to “Rookie,” and Sungjoo pokes her arm for a compliment of his own when she says they’re cute. Her heartbeat drowns out her own laugh in her ears.

Then there’s every variety show Sungjoo goes on ever. He always seems to get asked some question about his ideal type (that he loyally answers is Seulgi) or about Seulgi (who he’ll say is his ideal type), and Seulgi knows that the Sungjoo on her screen is two-parts Virtual Husband Sungjoo and one-part Sungjoo who knows how to act like he’s enamored with her, but her heart can’t help but swell every time an article is released about it, anyway.

There’s Sungjoo holding an umbrella over the both of them during one of the rare times they film in between her promoting on music shows (Sungjoo smiles wide and hands her the trophy when they win on M!Countdown, patting her on the head in the way she usually hates with a soft congratulations and her heart traitorously flutters) and him preparing for his comeback. His left shoulder gets soaked by tilting the umbrella over Seulgi, and no matter how much Sungjoo insists he can take it “because he’s a man,” Seulgi frowns.

“You can be a dry man,” she remarks and Sungjoo laughs a breathless laugh. And later when the rain pelts against the awning as they stand across from each other, the cameras off with someone yelling we’ll start recording again in five!, Seulgi’s struck with the fact that she hasn’t been pretending the whole day.

And then there’s Lee Haeun.

Seulgi isn’t jealous. Sometimes on Weekly Idol, before their girl group segment ended, Hyungdon would about it, and she’d laugh it off. It didn’t really matter – there was virtual husband and wife Sungjoo and Seulgi on one show, and MCs Sungjoo and Haeun on another. It was all just work, and they were all just coworkers, and it didn’t matter.

“Are you glaring at her?” Joohyun whispers to Seulgi backstage, as they’re waiting for their cue to take the stage. The spotlight shines off the top of Sungjoo and Haeun’s heads, and in the otherwise darkness, they look perfect and almost ethereal.

Seulgi also only got two hours of sleep the night before. “No,” she whispers back, and it sounds more like a hiss than she intended it to be. Joohyun looks unconvinced, but goes back to adjusting her mic.

But it’s not tall Lee Haeun – a good height next to Sungjoo, where Seulgi usually felt dwarfed – that sets the whole thing off, and it’s not Seungwan telling Seulgi that she thought Seulgi liked Sungjoo after that radio program, and it’s definitely not Sungjoo’s We Got Married mission of the week where he yells fighting, Kang Seulgi! into his mic after introducing Red Velvet for their goodbye stage, making the tip of Seulgi’s ears burn as she heard the crowd’s ooh in response.

Instead, it’s Sungjoo waiting backstage while she’s waiting backstage, brushing her shoulder with one of his broad ones purposefully and ghosting his fingers against the back of her hand on his way down the hallway past her. When she turns to look at him, he’s looking back at her with a lopsided grin with the promise of a game in his eyes that Seulgi hasn’t won for ages.

Seulgi doesn’t know what she’s thinking when she reaches for his hand and starts pulling him with her. But his hand is warm and his fingers are long and his eyes are wide when they stop in the upstairs corner near the bathroom that’s been out of service for weeks now and Seulgi leans closer and closer and closer until there’s no distance left between them.

Seulgi’s never kissed anyone before. She doesn’t know if she’s doing it right, or if Sungjoo wants to be kissed by her, but he makes a surprised noise when their lips finally meet before cradling her face in his hands and kissing back. There’s so much closeness that Seulgi pushes him against the wall to keep her balance, and there’s a slight smell of mildew around them, but she can feel Sungjoo’s tongue graze the roof of and the persistent pounding of her heart pulsing throughout her body and none of that matters. None of that matters and Sungjoo’s hands trail down to her waist, burning and solid against her sides. The world moves in a stop-start motion of pictures and cameras and then Seulgi suddenly remembers the unfolding and refolding of the boundaries between the real and the fake and realizes she doesn’t know where she put the paper.

She pulls away first. There’s her cherry-colored lipstick on his lips and his teeth and he’s breathing heavily like he’s actually breathless this time, like she’s won this time for real, and that’s the problem. Seulgi wipes the side of and there’s lipstick on the back of her hand, too light to be blood, too dark a stain to be her imagination or some aspect of their virtual relationship. She blinks and Sungjoo’s uneven eyes blur, blinks again and things slip into focus, but Seulgi can’t figure out where the boundary between their selves on the show and their selves backstage, without the cameras pointed at them, is. In its place is a smudged chalk line, the color of the lipstick her stylist carefully applied for her that's now all over Sungjoo's mouth.

“Seulgi,” she hears Sungjoo call for her as she backs away. He’s not smiling. “Seulgi,” and it's the last thing she hears before it’s just her heartbeat, beating, beating, beating in time with her steps, running down the hall and away from Sungjoo.

This brings us back to where we started. Seulgi doesn’t believe in cussing, but the only way she can really describe the situation is royally ed up.

Seulgi considers several alternatives.

First, there’s running away somewhere instead of going to the next schedule We Got Married filming, which is in a week. It’s not a bad option until Seulgi realizes she really doesn’t have anywhere to go without getting found or seriously berated.

Second, she could get sick. Yerim’s been to school a couple times recently, and there must be some nasty cold going around as fall bleeds into winter. There always was when Seulgi was in high school, at least. The thing is, Yerim keeps looking at her and sighing and Seulgi doesn’t know what she’s done wrong.

Third, she could attend filming and pretend nothing happened. Seulgi would rather try the running away.

And then the non-option: idols can date. It’s not recommended by management, and no one ever talks about it explicitly, but everyone knows that when you’re in your teens and early twenties, things just happen sometimes. As long as the public doesn’t find out, it can work, but Seulgi is a constant worrier and strict rule-follower so she just. Can’t.

There’s a few messages from Sungjoo over the next several days, all saying some variation of hey, we need to talk. Seulgi throws herself into some new game on her phone instead and gladly helps Joohyun with the house chores. Seungwan, usually the one forced into folding laundry with Joohyun, raises her eyebrows at Seulgi’s compliance for once, but doesn’t say anything about it. Bless her soul.

Seulgi knows several things about herself. She’s sure of her abilities even though they might not compare to everyone else’s. She has a positive outlook on life, but needs time to process things from time to time, overwhelmed by the sheer load of their schedules. She's the one who listens when Sooyoung or Yerim need a shoulder to cry on, when Joohyun confesses her worries as the leader into Seulgi’s hair, and when Seungwan smiles wistfully about memories in Canada.

But she also knows this: she is a runner, and she will run away from her problems rather than face them head-on. That’s what she’s doing now. Running. It’s why Dongjin will never know that she liked him back then, why Seulgi got scolded once by the company when she was sixteen after not getting into f(x), why she left Sungjoo in that hallway by himself, calling after her.

“Hey,” Yerim says, three days before she has to see Sungjoo again. She flicks Seulgi’s forehead and Seulgi refuses to open her eyes from the nap she’s trying to take, even though she woke up only four hours ago. “Seulgi unnie.”

Seulgi groans. “Not now, Yerim-ah,” she mumbles, burying herself into her comforter. “Don’t you have homework to do or something?”

“Or something,” Yerim replies, poking Seulgi’s cheek now. “It’s Saturday.”

Seulgi stops responding. Maybe if she plays dead, Yerim will leave her alone. “Stop wallowing,” Yerim starts instead of going away.

“‘M not wallowing,” Seulgi mutters against her pillow. She can practically hear Yerim roll her eyes.

“Yes, you are,” Yerim laughs. “You are so wallowing right now. You are the wallower of wallowers.”

Seulgi kicks underneath her blankets. Yerim cuddles into the place beside her and buries herself with Seulgi under her blankets. She matches her breathing with Seulgi’s and Seulgi waits for her to speak again.

“Just tell him,” Yerim says softly. Seulgi snorts. She knew Yerim had to be invested in her love life. “It’s that easy, you know.”

“No, it’s not,” Seulgi insists. She struggles for the words. “There’s…feelings and stuff.”

Yerim laughs at that. “Of course.” Her toes touch Seulgi’s ankle and they’re ice cold. “That’s what you say. I like you.”

“It’s.” Seulgi pauses and thinks of something to say, but there’s nothing. Her mind is tired from overthinking and wondering and calculating and trying to keep up with Sungjoo. “I can’t,” she chokes out, and it doesn’t seem right to sound so vulnerable in front of Yerim. She should be the one taking care of her, not the other way around.

“You can,” Yerim insists, and there’s no wavering in her voice. “If you can smash cockroaches with your slippers while all the rest of us run away from them, you can do this.”

Seulgi genuinely laughs for the first time this week. Her lungs burn from it, and she almost starts crying instead. “When'd you grow up so fast?” she asks, pulling at Yerim’s ponytail.

Yerim tickles her shins with her frosty toes. “So are you gonna do it?” she presses. “I want him to bring us coffee again sometime.”

That’s what it boils down to, Seulgi guesses. Her pride, her feelings, and Yerim’s coffee. “You ,” she notes. Too bad Yerim knows she doesn’t mean it.

Despite all her instincts telling her to run, Seulgi does in fact show up to the filming.

They don’t get a chance to talk before the cameras start rolling. Sungjoo’s laughing at something the noona who’s fixing his hair says and then he turns around and Seulgi feels her heart stop. The laughter freezes on his face before slipping into an expression between complete seriousness and a forced smile. Seulgi gives him what feels like a grimace back, and nothing’s happened yet, but her heart is racing in her chest, beating as fast as she wants to run away.

There’s snow piled on the sides of the sidewalk when they walk back from the supermarket to their house. “It’s winter already,” she says lightly, but her tongue feels heavy in .

Sungjoo looks at her, but lets his eyes wander back to the ground after a few steps. “Yeah,” he agrees, a small puff of his warm breath dissipating into the dusk. “Time passes so quickly.”

They go through the motions stiffly. If the staff notices the unusually uncomfortable atmosphere between them, they don’t say anything. It can always be edited to look better that it actually is. They don’t have to use the shot where Sungjoo’s eyes are trying to look anywhere but at her, and they can leave out the part where Seulgi burns half the cabbage, distracted by how long they have left before filming is over for the day.

Real life, though, isn’t so easily clipped and connected into perfection, Seulgi realizes. It’s messy – like the way Sungjoo laughed too loud when they went to a museum once and almost got kicked out – and stilted and awkward like Seulgi’s words that she can’t quite put into even, comprehensible blocks most of the time. The snow on the pavement washes away any semblance of the chalked-in line between reality and pretend, and this entire time Seulgi was busy bifurcating herself into Virtual Seulgi and Seulgi Seulgi was just her pretending that she wasn’t falling in love with Sungjoo – virtual or real.

“Sungjoo,” she says, without much thought. He looks at her from where she’s washing the pot they cooked soup in, caught off-guard. Seulgi turns the water off and looks at him instead.

“Hm?” There’s a wariness and weariness in his eyes. Seulgi in a deep breath, glancing around at the cameras around the house that she knows are filming them now. “Is there soap on my face?” he asks as she’s still steeling herself for what comes next.

There’s no knowing what comes after next.

This is what will show up on screen: Seulgi turning off the faucet. The view of the back of her head turning to look at Sungjoo.

“I like you, Kim Sungjoo,” they’ll hear her say. Her voice comes in louder than Sungjoo hears it himself. Cliffhanger. Cut to the next couple after the commercial.

This is what Seulgi sees: Sungjoo smiles. It’s small and not that lopsided and the tips of his ears are starting to turn red. He reaches for her hand and it’s soapy and tingly and numb but he holds it tightly in his anyway. And through the haze of it all, Seulgi thinks she feels his pulse, and it’s going as fast as hers.

He looks at her.

She doesn’t look away this time.