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Naeun doesn’t want to be here, but that’s life.
“Okay…action!”
Here, as in outside Shinee’s dorm, pretending she didn’t already greet everyone inside while the cameraman got set up. At least all she has to do is press the doorbell. Taemin had to cram himself into a box and then jump out to “surprise” everyone when he came around to her place.
She rings the doorbell. They answer the door. Taemin comes out of hiding, and they make fun of him again.
And then the scene is over, and she and Taemin are herded inside, and everything snaps back to normal for the fifteen minutes it takes the crew to settle in for the long haul.
Naeun didn’t get a good look around the dorm before, but now that she has the time, she can’t find anything that sets it apart from Apink’s. It’s just, she’s heard all kinds of rumors about SM groups. Mostly that SM starves them and locks them up in rat holes, but they all make enough money to move into their own apartments within a few years. Looks like neither is exactly true.
“Is Taeminnie being good to you, Naeun-ssi~?”
Jonghyun.
When she’d heard that she was doing the show with a Shinee member, she’d hoped it would be him. It’s funny how her heart doesn’t flutter when she sees him up close and personal, but she should know better, anyway. It’s probably the same when men see her.
Taemin shifts next to her. “Hyung, don’t. Stop it.”
“I’m talking to your wife right now. I can’t talk to her?” Jonghyun says, aggrieved, but he keeps talking to Taemin instead, reaching over to pluck at his collar. “What’s with your outfit, anyway?”
“PD-nim wanted to go all out for Chuseok,” Taemin replies distractedly, pulling a face as he tries to get a good look at himself. “I don’t know, it’s kind of cute, isn’t it?”
“You look cute, Naeun-ssi~” Jonghyun says promptly, remembering her.
Naeun isn’t sure she does. She’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt underneath her hanbok and can’t feel the skirt at all, and she’d be getting away with murder right now if she could just ignore the whispery sleeves and tight bodice. She can’t, so she feels kind of in between, not comfortable enough that she can forgive herself for not looking her best.
Jonghyun seems to know her feelings, because he tries again. “Seriously, you look really nice. It suits you.”
Maybe she would’ve been better off with him instead of Taemin, after all. Taemin is hard work. He doesn’t get things like feelings, and neither does she. Someone sensitive like Jonghyun would be useful when the writers are feeding her corny lines and the script decides her reactions to things, and she’s just supposed to go from there.
Maybe not, maybe he’d just do well on his own. Somehow after two years of living this job, she still doesn’t know how to respond to something so cheesy, and she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to address him. She doesn’t want to call someone she’s met like three times oppa, so she’s grateful that he’s sticking with Naeun-ssi off camera, but she can’t return the favor either, when he’s like four or five years older than her and she doesn’t know how he’ll react.
She doesn’t call him anything, and fakes it until filming gets underway.
And then fakes it some more, and then some more. Taemin isn’t right there in hell with Naeun for once. For once he’s fine, laughing with his members over the stupidest things, letting them fuck with both him and Naeun as much as they want. Or as much as the PD and writers want. She’s totally alone even when they let Eunji in, because today Eunji’s character isn’t Naeun’s sounding board, it’s Key’s love interest.
They reach a stopping point after they swallow their dumplings (she chews forever hoping she’ll get to spit it out, but no luck) and perform their greetings (and Taemin, Minho, and Jonghyun climb down from the back of the chair).
Naeun hopes they’ll get break, but instead the junior writer that always plays intermediary between her bosses and their human guinea pigs comes up to them. At least the assistant PD is with her. Naeun prefers dealing with him to the rest of the production team. He kind of looks like her dad and he’s an Apink fan. He says Namjoo is his bias, but he still fanboys over Naeun, and when filming runs late he asks her about her diet before he orders food.
“So we’ve got some games for you to play. We’ll go over the rules and suggest some punishments, but if you guys can come up with better ones, we’re open to changing things around. Sounds fun, right~?” The assistant PD gives them the biggest smile he can. “But first…”
He nods to Writer Unnie, and Naeun’s stomach knots. This is never good. But she barely has time to worry before Writer Unnie comes out with it.
“Taemin-ah, Naeun-ah, are you guys okay switching costumes at some point?”
And in the end it’s only bad for Taemin, so there’s no way she’s going to answer until he does. She sneaks a glance at him, and she hasn’t learned to read his face, but she doesn’t have to, to know he’s annoyed. He looks so blank, so still. She’s had to shut herself down just like that more times than she cares to remember. The last time was five, ten minutes ago.
“Taemin-ah, we wouldn’t ask, but it’s something we can sell, it could bring ratings. If we do well, you do well, too.”
This woman started talking down to them by the second episode.
Taemin bites his lip. Says carefully, “It’s not that I dislike the idea…”
“Like you don’t know how pretty you are,” Key butts in, and Naeun isn’t sure if he’s trying to help Taemin, or if he’s trying to get Taemin back in line. Maybe both. “You know this is how variety works, Taeminnie. Since you’re already doing it, do it right.”
“Besides, if you’ve done it once, it’s already too late, the images are all out there,” Minho adds, because why not. They all have so many opinions about everything, it’s like a group with three Eunjis. "You can take it from me. The rest of us wish we looked as good in a skirt as you do."
Taemin isn’t even looking at either of them, or at her. She follows his eyes and finds Jonghyun, gnawing on his lip and returning Taemin’s gaze a few seconds at a time. He sounds almost cautious when he says, “You’re too pretty for your own good, Taemin-ah.”
She doesn’t get why that settles it, not at all, but Taemin is saying, “I can do it, I’ll do it,” and that’s it, the end. She watches Jonghyun watch Taemin, long enough to see him look away and kind of smirk to himself, and that doesn’t get her anywhere. She decides it’s whatever, and is left hoping she shouldn’t feel bad for looking forward to freeing herself from her hanbok and stealing his. Boy clothes are so easy it’s ridiculous.
They play the games the staff wants them to play. Naeun even has fun for some of it. She’s not into Taemin, but she’s not going to complain about skinship with a cute boy, at least not until she films her talking head later and has to tell the public what they want to hear. Maybe it'd be different if she weren't the one sitting here, laughing before she gets what's funny and hoping that Taemin doesn't mind that her hand's a little sweaty, but as it is, she just does not get how people are going to watch this episode and think that any of the things she does with Taemin are a big deal. Why, if they’re such a big deal, it’s okay for her and Taemin to fake it like this.
Whatever. Taemin’s hyungs do everything they can to make it happen. Skinship, couple stuff, whatever. Jonghyun is the worst, telling them they look good together like he might really mean it, ripping up the rules and forcing them to take punishments they think they’ve avoided, and then watching his work like he can’t tear his eyes away. She’s not sure if he’s torturing them, or torturing himself, and that confuses her. Maybe he’s been single for a long time, maybe he hates couples. She knows he doesn’t hate girls, she’s heard a few things from other people. And he’s always been nice to her.
It’s not like he’s not nice right now. Just…She thinks she’s met at least three or four different Jonghyuns today already, and this is the first one she kind of dislikes.
Jonghyun keeps at them until Taemin finally attacks him, trampling on their giant paper game board and grabbing Jonghyun by the collar. Jonghyun pushes him away, smiling like crazy, like that’s what he was looking for. He doesn’t stop until he gives the writers what they’re looking for as well, though, so in the end Naeun follows Taemin out of the circle of cameras and sound equipment to change.
She’s pretty sure Taemin has something on under his costume, too, but when he leads her over to his and Jonghyun’s bathroom, she still shuts herself in to take hers off. She gets the bodice loose, and takes a minute just to breathe.
She doesn’t realize she’s smelling lavender until she sees the air freshener. Nice. She didn’t know boys cared about stuff like that. It kind of makes her second-guess, because she’s always figured Taemin is hopeless, but maybe Jonghyun isn't as bad. Or maybe she and the other Apink members don’t even realize what slobs they are, maybe this kind of touch is the bare minimum of homemaking.
“Naeun-ah, we’re supposed to trade,” Taemin says through the door, sounding bemused.
That makes her feel a little dumb, too, so when she hands him her stuff she leaves it open a crack. He doesn’t even bother returning to the bathroom kitty corner to this one, just gets dressed out in the hallway. It doesn’t matter since there’s no one around but the two of them for once, no cameras. Maybe it’s the first time she’s ever been alone with him.
“Girls’ clothes are evil,” Taemin says, and Naeun hears the skirt rustling up his body, knows what’s coming and feels kind of sorry for him. Sure enough, “How did you wear this thing for so long? I think I’m going to burst.”
“You should try wearing a bra sometime,” she says without thinking. And then she thinks. “Oppa.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” she says, mostly because she doesn’t know what the right thing to say is, or how to get him to feel comfortable. Taemin doesn’t push her, and she wavers. “Just…I was thinking that it’s okay if you look better in it than me. Traditional isn’t really my style.”
Yeah, it would’ve been better not to say anything.
Taemin surprises her, though, because right away he replies, “You said it first~” and makes her smile.
She doesn’t know him that well. She’s never tried to know him as a man. It’s just, she knows she wouldn’t want to be known for looking like a boy. It’s hard enough trying to be somebody else’s dream girl for like ninety percent of her life, she can’t imagine being told she’s not woman enough on top of that. How frustrating that would be.
“Maybe it’s weird to say this, but I really don’t have a complex about the way I look,” Taemin says, almost like he knows what she’s thinking, and that’s a first. They do better on their own. “It’s more like…sometimes I feel like people only see this one side of me, so I hate showing it to them. Don’t you have anything like that, Naeun-ah?”
She thinks about it. She thinks about netizens obsessing over whether she’s had a nose job. Like they’re trying to catch her in a lie or something, like plastic surgery is scary and wrong, when everybody that can afford it in this country gets work done. Non-idols get work done all the time. She thinks about how her middle school friends don’t talk to her anymore now that they’re all in college, like they look down on her because she's making money shaking her ass on TV, like her success doesn’t count because men like her or something. She thinks about how it feels when men call her their ideal type and then get her entirely wrong, or when, every single comeback, the company weighs and measures her and picks apart her body and gives her homework like “become a vegetarian,” how crazy it makes her that she has to listen to people like that. How crazy it makes her that she can’t stop listening to them, how much easier it would be to just start hating herself instead.
She finishes before Taemin. He’s struggling to tie his bow, so she helps him.
“You do look really pretty,” she says when she steps back to get a look at him, since he does, and she thinks it’s okay to say that when it’s just the two of them.
Somehow that gets a laugh out of Taemin, that dumb, hiccupping one that might be kind of cute. It doesn’t linger in his voice, though, when he says, “You, too,” like he really means it, and she’s not used to that. A guy saying nice stuff just to say it, like she doesn’t owe him anything. Normally she doesn’t hear it when she’s told she’s pretty, because she doesn’t put so much into her appearance for anybody else’s approval, and it’s way too easy for men to say things when they don’t know anything about it.
Taemin gets it because he’s an idol, he’s the same as her. He’s the same as her, so he can say whatever he wants and she might even listen to him.
She gives him her cutest smile, just because she can. “Thanks.”
They go back out. She’s not sure if it’s the Taemin she just spent the last few minutes with that comes out and twirls for the cameras and keeps on smiling, or if Taemin is better at faking it than she thought.
They hang around and ad lib for a while, and the scene goes nowhere because there’s no game, no direction. There’s enough material at this point anyway, and the PD figures it’s time to wrap up the segment.
Which means it’s time for Naeun and Taemin to have a heart-to-heart about the progress their relationship has made today. Yay.
They get a little break while the crew figures out the logistics of that. Taemin gets swept up by Jonghyun’s chatter, so Naeun takes her chance and talks to Eunji instead. She gets to be normal for a whole five minutes this time, before that same writer unnie is drawing her away again.
This time it’s her and Taemin and Jonghyun. Apparently the crew members who scouted Taemin’s dorm ahead of today’s filming didn’t mention that Taemin and Jonghyun shared a room, and apparently there isn’t a singe Shawol on the writing staff, because this is news to all of them.
Anyway, the writers think they’ve got something here. Writer Unnie says they want Taemin and Naeun to go in ahead, and then Jonghyun can come in and be the annoying third wheel until they get rid of him. Presto, drama. Humor. Something like that.
“Can you do that, Jonghyun-ssi?” Writer Unnie asks him.
Naeun doesn’t know if Writer Unnie is asking because she doubts Jonghyun’s variety skills, or if she’s actually asking him if he’s okay doing it. She’ll just keep pushing, anyway, so she might as well stop asking, start telling.
Jonghyun makes her wait, looking at Taemin. He’s done nothing but look at Taemin all day. Maybe he sucks at variety, Naeun is kind of getting that, maybe he’s looking for help, but Taemin definitely can’t save him when he’s even worse at it. They all chose the wrong profession.
Still, Jonghyun keeps on looking and Taemin keeps on not saying anything, until finally Jonghyun assents, and then tries to figure out what he’s supposed to do, even.
“Am I dense? Or is it a jealousy thing?” His voice seems a little twisted up, rushed and nervous when he spells it out, “Like, Taeminnie has a girlfriend and I don’t?”
Taemin’s eyes snap up to Jonghyun’s face, but now Jonghyun is the one ignoring him, and Naeun is back to the part where she does not get these two at all.
“Both. You’re dense and jealous, go with that,” Writer Unnie says immediately, and she seems relieved. Which, her job probably stresses her out, it probably eats up her whole life, but whatever. Naeun works twenty-one hour days too, without using people and forcing them into shit.
They go through with it. She and Taemin talk about stuff they don’t know how to talk about, and then Jonghyun blows in and plays his part. Simple as that.
And Naeun is getting off work in like an hour at worst, and she should be focusing on that, but this scene tastes bad. There’s a pink blanket spread out on Taemin’s bed, and Taemin explains himself to her the way he didn’t need to before, without four extra pairs of eyes and ears trained on him. And the Jonghyun she’s dealing with right now is in between the sweetheart she’s met off camera and the maniac she’s had to put up with on, and she feels like maybe it’s a version of him she shouldn’t be seeing. It feels wrong when Taemin asks her what she thinks of Jonghyun, and it gets worse when Taemin hugs her and smirks at Jonghyun over her shoulder until Jonghyun bails. She tugs his arm away from her, trying to get some space without ruining the scene and setting the clock back, and he remembers she’s there after a while.
But now it’s over, the shoot is finally over. They spend a couple minutes clapping for everyone’s hard work and saying their goodbyes. Naeun strips down to her normal clothes, but in the end the production team lets her and Taemin keep their hanbok, lucky them, and neither of them care enough to switch back. Maybe if her mom takes up the sleeves and legs, she can give it to one of her little cousins for Halloween. Taemin is still wearing hers, wandering around and saying his goodbyes like he’s forgotten he’s wearing it. Knowing him, he probably has.
And then that’s it, she’s out of here.
She and Eunji get all the way to the van before she realizes her bracelet is missing.
“For fuck’s sake, Naeunnie,” Eunji says when she tells her. Predictably. Naeun totally doesn’t listen when she shouts after her, “Hurry up or we’ll leave without you!”
Okay, well. She does run up the stairs, at least until she meets the last of the camera crew coming down and flattens herself against the wall to let them pass. When she finally reaches Shinee’s door, Minho is just stepping out of it, and he lets her in without asking anything.
She thinks maybe it fell off while she was in the bathroom, and spends a couple minutes telling herself there’s nothing to be grossed out about while she's on her hands and knees on the tile. If they use an air freshener they probably keep it pretty clean in here, it’s probably not to hide the fact that they don’t clean, or anything.
No luck.
She’ll have to try Taemin’s room. His door is closed, and she’s raised her hand to knock when she hears Taemin’s voice.
“The blanket wasn’t even funny, hyung. You like pink more than I do, anyway.”
“What about you,” Jonghyun replies, and there’s that rush in his voice again, “were you trying to make me jealous?”
Um. What?
“Did it work?”
Naeun absolutely should not be listening to this, but she’s rooted to the spot, and if she makes a noise and they find out she’s out here, she thinks she’ll evaporate. Eunji is going to leave her behind and she’s going to be stuck right here forever and her bracelet is probably in there with them.
And it’s already too late, Taemin is already going on, “It had to happen anyway, isn’t it more fun this way?”
Jonghyun laughs, that breathless laugh from this afternoon that says it’s not funny. “For you or me?”
“Both.”
Jonghyun answers with his body. Wet sounds, heavy breathing, and she knows this part. They’re obviously making out. And then she hears them hit the mattress in a rustle of her skirt, Taemin’s skirt, bed protesting loudly under their combined weight, and she should go, she needs to go, they won’t notice her now, she can go—
“Hyung,” and the word is dragged out of Taemin in a moan, and forget evaporating, Naeun’s face is going to burst into flames any minute now. She’s probably going to hell on top of that.
“Call me seobangnim,” Jonghyun demands breathlessly.
What is going on. Like her own life isn’t insane enough.
And then Taemin’s voice again, strained into a falsetto, high and breathy. “Seobangnim~”
“Look at me, look at me and say it,” Jonghyun insists, sandpaper rough, like this is doing something for him, and oh God, Naeun needs to get. out. of. here. And maybe never look them in the face again. And then go her whole life flipping the channel every time she lands on a sageuk.
There’s a long silence, and maybe she thought out loud, maybe the door is going to fly open and they’ll be there and then she doesn’t know what she’s going to do. Beg for mercy? Or insist that she didn’t mean to listen in on them, she’ll never say anything, she just wants her bracelet, her one-time BFF gave it to her when she was thirteen and she hasn’t seen that girl since they met for coffee two years ago but it’s a good luck charm and it’s always been there for her when she needs it, and she is totally not a total pervert, and and and.
None of that happens. The silence is only the time it takes for Taemin to say it to Jonghyun in his normal voice, the voice he used to talk to her outside the bathroom a couple feet away and several million years ago.
“Seobangnim...”
Naeun gets out of there.
And gets as far as the living room before she surprises Key, coming out of his own room. He recovers fast, tells her to hang on, then fetches something.
“Is this yours?” he asks her, and holds his hand up to the light, something small and silvery slinking through his fingers. “I found it in the couch cushions. It’s not any of ours, and I don’t think it’s Eunji’s.”
Her bracelet.
She’s kind of aware that Key is watching her face, and she doesn’t know what she looks like right now. She’s read lots of comments saying her face has no expression, and for once she hopes that’s true.
All he says is, “Taeminnie probably doesn’t make a great hubby, but he’d make a good friend,” but somehow there’s a lot more to it. It’s one of those moments where she feels like she’s falling short, because all she has are his direct words, and he’s trying to say something else with them.
When she makes it down the stairs and out into the dark, Eunji and Manager Oppa are still there, waiting for her. Manager Oppa is a teddy bear, so he doesn’t say anything to her, just pulls out into traffic, but Eunji isn’t mad, either. Naeun finds out it’s been less than ten minutes.
She watches the city outside her window for a while. Seoul is so pretty at night it makes her heart hurt, but she has to make an effort to notice that now, or she won’t see anything.
The ache in her chest makes her want to talk to someone, and Eunji is right there, like always.
“Unnie.”
Eunji doesn’t move or open her eyes, leaning back in her seat with her arms crossed over her chest and her legs sprawled impressively. There’s a hole in one of her socks.
“What?”
“I found out something I shouldn’t have,” Naeun says.
Eunji cracks her eyes open to shoot her a Look. “Then don’t tell me about it.” Naeun just waits for Eunji’s conscience to wear her down, and it doesn’t take long before she pokes Naeun with her toe and gives her another one of her faces, the one that prickles with compassion. “Is it that bad? If it’s bad, I’ll listen.”
“No, it’s nothing like that. It doesn’t even effect me, it’s about someone else,” Naeun says to start with, because that’s important, and then she tries to figure out what she even wants to say. “Just…should I tell them that I know? I don’t want things to be awkward.”
Eunji turns in her seat towards her, and Naeun does the same. Their knees bump. “Okay, so this is obviously about Taemin or one of the others.”
Naeun hesitates, then says, “Taemin.”
“Naeun-ah, you guys aren’t close, are you?”
“Not really,” Naeun says, and kind of regrets that it's the truth, thinking about what Key told her. “I don’t see him outside of filming, and filming…you’ve seen how it is, unnie.”
If they were part of the same company, if they’d met some other way, some natural way, she wants to think they would be friends. But they aren't and they didn’t, so that’s as far as it goes for her.
Eunji doesn’t let her linger. “Does whatever it is change how you see him?”
“No, that’s the point,” Naeun blurts out. “I want him to know that I’m not—” another judgmental creep. “That he can be open around me.”
“If it doesn’t change anything, then leave it be. He didn’t tell you, so if you say anything, you’re just saying it for yourself.”
Naeun doesn’t know how to argue with that, but it leaves her feeling frustrated and kind of shitty. She’s probably met a lot of gay people before without even knowing it, that’s the thing, but now she knows at least two people who are definitely not straight, and she has no way to let them know that she doesn’t care. That she doesn’t want to be like the people who tell her how to look, how to behave, how to live her life, and then spend all their time trying to tear her down for not meeting their expectations, when she never agreed to anything. She hates people like that so much, and she has no way to say that out loud, either.
Eunji is right. This is about her.
Eunji eyes her, almost like she’s trying not to smile, and Naeun doesn’t get her at all. And then maybe Naeun doesn’t want to, when Eunji pushes her foot under Naeun’s thigh, the one with the toe sticking out, and says casually, “By the way, Naeun-ah. You’re lucky you don’t talk much, because you’re way too obvious when you do.”
Naeun rolls her eyes, the best defense she can manage, because clearly opening her mouth doesn’t get her anywhere. She hopes Eunji doesn’t mean what she thinks she means, because it’s not even Naeun’s secret to tell.
But even if Eunji definitely means it, which she definitely does, she’ll never tell anyone else, anyway.
“Don’t worry,” Eunji says, like she’s trying to tell Naeun that somehow, when Naeun should never have thought otherwise, “I already had some idea, you just confirmed some things.”
And all of the sudden Naeun goes from being super annoyed with her, to feeling grateful that Eunji exists, that she’s a part of Naeun’s life and she’s not going anywhere.
“So in other words, it’s more like I’m lucky I talked to you first,” she says, giving up on being cool for the rest of the night.
Eunji grins at her, like she’s glad that Naeun finally gets it. “Damn right.”
“Unnie,” she says, because suddenly she wants to be honest, for once. She wants to share her own secrets, for once.
“What?”
“I have a boyfriend,” she says, low enough that Manager Oppa won’t hear her over the radio. “It’s only been two weeks, but I think it’s real this time.”
“I won’t ask who,” Eunji says, barely hesitating. “You can tell me later. Or I can meet him.”
"I'd like that."
Naeun is going back to her own life for the day. It’s not big or bright enough for the person the world wants her to be, but it’s the one thing she has that’s exactly what she wants it to be, the one place where she can be herself and not worry about what other people see when they look at her. She wonders if maybe that’s what Jonghyun can give to Taemin, and then she leaves it there. The closer the van gets to home, the more her heart picks up, the lighter her shoulders feel, the warmer she gets inside.