◻

There was wine and jazz, dozens of voices deep and soft, loud and quiet. There was a packet of cigarettes between John's fingers and the tap of the box on the table as he shook one free. His lighter was old and made of brass. Seunghyun's was plastic.A Billie Holiday song played from the speakers on the walls, half covered over by rubber plants that made the room feel smaller. It smelled of incense and cigars. No windows.

Seunghyun was tired.

He pulled out a cigarette. Jiyong sometimes sent him messages saying, 'Let's quit tomorrow,' and he would answer, 'sure thing'. Whenever they next met, they had cigarettes in their mouths or in their pockets. Jiyong wasn't a quitter; That was his excuse. He read that on the internet, 'I'd stop smoking but I'm not a quitter,' then he started saying that to everyone like he'd said it first. Like he owned it.

Seunghyun just didn't want to quit.

He the plastic lighter out of his pocket but failed to coax a flame out of it. John slid his own over the tabletop courtesy of the Zippo company. The words Solid Brass lined the top and Seunghyun wondered what that meant. What was brass even worth? Not much, he imagined. A few hundred won, at most. He lit his cigarette and Johns too as he sat back, proffered cigarette in hand.

John was focussed on the papers in front of him. His fingers were slender and soft.

The impromptu gathering was over but Seunghyun remained. He had nowhere to go but the hotel and he couldn't sleep anyway. Insomnia. He would have fallen asleep on the floor of the bar if he thought he could. John didn't ask him to leave when the time came. He made no sign of leaving himself. As the others stood up, Cha Seung-won and Kim Seung-woo and a producer, Seunghyun waved them off and settled back down into wine and cigarettes and jazz music he wasn't sure he liked but definitely didn't not like.

He wondered if John could hear it. He seemed not to hear most things, only what he had to. Background noise covered a whole gamut of things in Johns world. Even on set, with explosions left and right, people talking into his ear, calls coming through on the radio, people chattering incessantly everywhere, screaming orders left and right. He always heard what he needed to.

He was very zen.

Seunghyun hoped he could absorb some of John's calm by osmosis. He spent six weeks after their first meeting trying to think of an appropriate descriptor before settling eventually on panglossian. John had a way about him; this painful optimism. He laughed when Seunghyun told him so and answered, 'Hopefully you'll get to know me better'.

Seunghyun didn't find that funny. He didn't want to find out John was secretly an alcoholic or deeply unhappy and unfulfilled. His optimism and calm was all that held him together on some days.

While John sat opposite looking over papers in a binder, jotting down the odd note or drawing the occasional line, Seunghyun looked around. The club was dark and oppressively small. Cigarette smoke filled the air. It moved like clouds past the scattered tables and lounges across the floor. It moved as a single entity and faded in the distance. Seunghyun couldn't follow it. His eyes lost focus.

There was a man in the corner with a woman half his age. He had on a nice suit, not designer but one custom made by a personal tailor. It fit him just right. His face was plump and flushed from alcohol and there were two men at a nearby table who kept looking back discretely. Seunghyun was reminded of gangster flicks and Japanese Yakuza films. Red-face was the boss or the father and the others were his security. The girl, she was nondescript. She was beautiful but something about her company made her seem so off-limits her natural glow dimmed to nothing.

Seunghyun wondered if John was the sort of man who came to clubs and