“Hey, this isn’t over. None of this.” I press a finger to her lips. “Promise me that we’ll finish what we started tonight.” I hold the phone away and wait for her to answer me.
She grins. “Guess you’ll just have to see.”
“No.” I hold her tighter. “I don’t think I can handle the stress, especially now. Promise me.”
Her eyes soften as I hear Haneul talking through the phone. But for some reason, this seems just as important. “I promise.” Her lips feel soft against my finger. “That we’ll talk. Is that good enough?”
“No.” I’m gruff as I pull away. “But it’s all I’ll get, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” I nod.
“Okay.” Her lips are swollen. I did that.
Pride wells up in me as we walk out of the bathroom and into the living room. I hop back on the phone and put it on speaker. I’m on cloud nine until Haneul continues talking.
“So, as I mentioned, SWT is releasing their single the same week we were going to drop the mini-album. We either fix our release date, or we just take our chances going up against them on the same day.”
I hang my head and then look up. “We can’t compete; you know that. We talked about that before when we decided to do the teaser. They’re like the next BTS.”
“Yeah,” Haneul says. “I’m very aware of how popular they are.”
“So, we release earlier,” Ah-Ri says. “And we kill it.”
I know what this means.
Sleepless nights.
Stress.
More stress.
Oh, yeah, and stress.
I look at her, needing more direction than oh, yeah, let’s just do this and kill it. This means we’ll have no lives until we wrap everything.
“It’s going to be brutal,” she finally says and then reaches for my hand. “We have no choice. We have to make this work.”
“Okay.” I sigh. “So, even though it’ll be weird…we ask permission to live together or at least in the same building…as a group. All of us. So we can practice.”
“Is that smart?” Haneul asks on the phone. “If fans find out—I don’t know, man. We can always ask or we can just bust our asses in the training rooms.”
I look at Ah-Ri, knowing it’s not smart at all. Still, I ask, “Do we have any other choice? I feel like we’re running out of options.”
“No,” Haneul says. “It’s this or nothing.”
“All right.” I sigh. “Call the label and see what we can do. If anything. Maybe the girls just come over and practice with us in the apartment when we can’t use the practice rooms. We need to get to work.”
“I’ll get Jisoo on the phone, too,” Ah-Ri says. “It looks like sleep will be a thing of the past now, huh?”
“I’m headed to the practice room. You guys in?” Haneul says through the phone.
I want to say no, but he’s right; we need more practice, which means evenings and shit—just all of it.
“Yeah,” I say. “We’ll meet you guys there.”
“We can do this,” Haneul says.
I want to say: “But can we?”
Instead, I just agree.
Things are about to get way more complicated.
Chapter Twelve
Ah-Ri
It’s late, and I’m confused. I still taste him on my lips, and now we’re all in the practice room at the label, trying to figure out what to do with our next four songs and pull off this seemingly impossible feat.
Recording them isn’t going to be the issue.
No, the problem will be the choreography for our Showcase. In the States, you release your single or album and see how things go. You don’t have the same Showcase that we do in Korea. It’s so much pressure that it makes me want to crawl under the covers of my bed when I think about it.
Our Showcase will be everything.
It’s our reveal to the world.
Things must be perfect.
Not only that, but we’ll have variety shows and other live performances to follow, so we can’t exactly be out of sync, even a little bit.
And all of this has to happen now in record time.
Hours later, as sweat pours down my face, I check my phone.
It’s two in the morning, and we need to be at the studio at eight a.m. I take another drink of water, and Jisoo passes me a protein bar.
Thankful, I scarf it down and stare at myself in the mirror again.
“This choreography is harder,” Jisoo says almost to herself. “It feels intense. Less fluid.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “It’s almost…angry.”
The guys are quiet.
Finally, Ryan speaks up. “My sister wrote it.”
“The song?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t look at me in the mirror, he just stares down at his feet. “She wrote it before she died.”
“Was she angry?” Jisoo asks.
I shoot her a look.
“What?” She shrugs. “It’s a powerful song, but it is angry.”
“We wrote it together,” Ryan says, seeming lost as he clears his throat. “My parents weren’t always there for us. So, yeah, we wrote an angry song. I never thought it would release, but after her…after she—” He runs his hands through his hair.