Chapter Text
Yerin sat at the bar, nursing her drink and desperately trying not to think about Luke.
Trying, and failing miserably.
The dive bar was loud, packed despite it being a Monday night. Music blasted from aging speakers, conversations overlapped into a constant roar, and every available surface seemed coated in a suspicious layer of unidentifiable stickiness. The air smelled like spilled beer and someone's too strong cologne, and around her, cast and crew occupied nearly every corner of the room, their laughter carrying above the noise.
At one point, she thought she saw him, and her heart lurched before her brain had the chance to catch up.
From the side, the stranger had the same crooked grin, the same unruly brown hair that always looked as though he'd run a hand through it moments earlier, the same ridiculous wheezing laugh that somehow sounded like a kettle threatening to boil over. For one foolish, hopeful second, she found herself watching him—until he turned, and she saw the wrong eyes, the wrong face. The wrong person entirely.
The disappointment hit with embarrassing force, sharp and sudden, like missing a step in the dark.
It was ridiculous, really. Luke was several thousand miles away, almost certainly asleep by now given the time difference, curled up in some flat in London she'd never seen. There was absolutely no reason for him to be sitting in a dive bar in Brooklyn on a Monday night, but that didn't stop the brief, irrational spark of hope from stinging when it died. It felt a little like waking from a particularly good dream and spending a few seconds trying to convince yourself it had been real.
The press tour had ended weeks ago, and she'd done everything she could to get him out of her head. She'd thrown herself into rehearsals, performances, the new city, long walks she didn't need to take and books she didn't finish reading—anything that might keep her occupied long enough not to think about him.
It hadn't worked. If anything, the distance had made things worse. Without interviews to distract her, without cameras following them around, without him occupying the seat beside her in cars and press junkets and the long, bored stretches of downtime in between, there was suddenly far too much room for her thoughts to wander.
And somehow, no matter where they started, they always found their way back to him—the particular way he laughed at his own bad jokes, the state of his rumpled hair when she saw him in the early morning, the way he used to glance at her sideways when he thought she wasn't looking.
"Hey, Yerin! What do you want?"
She glanced over to find Phia and Lydia sliding onto the stools beside her. At this point, they felt more like family than cast-mates.
The London run had wrapped successfully, and tonight's first New York performance had gone off without a hitch, ending with a standing ovation that had left her ears ringing long after the curtain fell. Naturally, the cast had decided that was reason enough to descend on a dive bar somewhere in Brooklyn and celebrate.
Maybe she was getting old.
Across the room, a cluster of crew had shoved three tables together and were already several drinks ahead of everyone else. Someone was laughing loudly enough to turn heads at the bar, and someone else was attempting, with the particular persistence of the very drunk, to convince the bartender to put on a specific song.
Yerin couldn't imagine having that much energy after a show. Two hours ago she'd been standing beneath stage lights, adrenaline flooding her veins as the curtain rose. Now all she wanted was her bed, and maybe eight consecutive hours of silence.
Everyone around her seemed intent on getting absolutely plastered—something she couldn't quite understand, considering they only had one day off before they were back at it again, the Wednesday show looming. She had little interest in more than the drink already sitting in front of her. These days, the appeal of waking up without a pounding headache far outweighed the thrill of a wild night out.
God, she was getting old.
"Just get me another dirty martini," she said. "Thanks."
"No problem, babe," Phia replied easily, flashing her a grin as she slid her card across the sticky counter.
For a moment, the three of them sat in comfortable silence. Almost without thinking, Yerin reached for her phone, thumb hovering before she even unlocked it. The screen lit up. Nothing. No missed calls, no new messages, just the same lock screen photo she hadn't changed in months. She set it face-down on the bar and immediately pretended she hadn't checked it in the first place.
Unfortunately, Lydia had noticed.
Yerin watched, in her periphery, as Lydia's eyes narrowed, then as she slowly turned on her stool to face her completely.
Yerin grew suspicious immediately.
"...What?"
"So," Lydia said.
"So?"
"Yerin."
"Yes?"
"Are you okay?"
Yerin blinked blankly at her. The question had come entirely out of nowhere.
Then again, maybe it hadn't. Looking back, she'd spent most of the evening staring into space, glass halfway to her lips, thoughts somewhere else entirely. More than once she'd missed whatever conversation Phia and Lydia had been having. She'd laughed half a second behind everyone else at jokes, and she had apparently developed a habit of checking her phone every ten minutes, as though something might have changed in that time.
Still.
"…Uh, yeah?"
Lydia simply stared while Phia let out a short laugh.
"You took your time there, huh?" Phia remarked.
"What?"
"Answering."
Yerin groaned and buried her face in her hands, the cool of her own palms a small relief against her suddenly warm cheeks.
"Guys, I'm serious. I'm fine. The show's great. New York's great. Everything's great. I'm great. You know, I'm actually so great."
The words tumbled out in one breathless rush, tripping over each other in their haste to sound convincing, which, she suspected, only made them sound less so. Lydia raised an eyebrow as Phia accepted Yerin's martini from the bartender and slid it across to her, olive bobbing gently against the rim.
"Bullshit," she said affectionately.
"Don't lie," Lydia added, gentler now, her hand briefly warm against Yerin's forearm. "I don't know what's bothering you, but you were incredible tonight. You're incredible every single night."
Out of the corner of her eye, Yerin caught Phia nodding in agreement, and she quickly dropped her gaze to the fresh martini in front of her. The concern in their voices made something twist painfully in her chest.
"You know you can talk to us, right?" Lydia asked.
"I know."
"Good."
Yerin wrapped her fingers around the stem of the glass.
"Unfortunately for you both, I still won't."
A laugh escaped her before she could stop it, and the knot in her chest loosened, if only slightly, just enough to let her breathe a little easier.
"See?" Phia pointed triumphantly. "There she is."
Yerin shook her head and brought the martini to her lips, the cold bite of olive brine hitting her tongue.
Maybe she was just tired. Maybe it was New York, the rehearsals, the upcoming performances—the constant whirlwind of it all finally catching up with her.
Or maybe she was still hopelessly hung up on a man who wasn't even hers, currently several thousand miles away. A man she hadn't spoken to nearly as much as she'd wanted to since the tour ended, whose texts had grown shorter and further apart, whose name she was trying so very hard not to think about and failing, spectacularly, on a nightly basis.
That was the most embarrassing part—that every time her phone lit up, some small, pathetic part of her hoped it might be him, though it never was.
Her grip tightened slightly around the glass, knuckles paling faintly.
These feelings would pass.
Surely they would. They had to. Any day now.
Yerin carefully ignored the fact that she'd been telling herself the exact same thing for weeks.
"Yerin, you were amazing tonight!"
"Sign this, sign this!"
"Could you please tell my friend that you love her! She's such a massive fan!"
The stage door had been its usual chaos—a crowd pressed against the barricade, phone flashlights and Sharpies thrust toward her the second she stepped outside, voices calling her name from every direction at once. She loved this part, truly, loved it even when her hand cramped from signing programs and her voice had gone thin and papery.
She signed everything handed to her, posed for photo after photo, told every single person who asked that yes, she'd tell their friend, their sister, their mum that she loved them—and meant it, every time, because how could she not? These were the people who'd built her this life, this ridiculous, wonderful life, out of nothing but showing up, night after night.
It was just a lot, sometimes. Still. Even now.
She hadn't quite adjusted to it yet—the sheer scale of it, the way her name alone could gather an army with pitchforks online (though the less she thought about Twitter, the better), the way strangers now occasionally recognised her on the subway, in coffee shops, in places she used to be able to disappear. A year ago she'd have been the one waiting at a barricade like that, and some days it still didn't feel entirely real that she was the one on the other side of it now.
By the time she'd finally made it back to her place, peeling off her coat and kicking her shoes into some corner she'd deal with tomorrow, she had nothing left to give.
Yerin fell with a huff and a groan onto the pillow, not even bothering to pull back the duvet first.
Simply put, she was exhausted. Whoever had devised the idea of seven shows a week, might have been slightly insane. Though Yerin supposed she was the more insane one for agreeing to do it.
Being able to perform The Maids and speak with fans was, without question, worth the exhaustion.
It just didn't make her any less tired.
She rolled over and pulled her phone out of her pocket. Absentmindedly, she opened her messages and clicked on Luke's name.
What was she even meant to say?
That today, a fan had asked her to say hi to him for them, and she'd simply smiled and said she loved working with him—unable to admit to a group of total strangers that they weren't really in touch anymore. That despite the promises they'd made in that last week of the tour, half-joking and half-not, to keep sending messages and voice notes no matter what, the messages had slowed to nothing, and neither of them had said anything about it. And now here she was, thumb hovering uselessly over his name at midnight.
Their last exchange sat there, weeks old now. A link to some book he'd said reminded him of her, sent with no further explanation except thought of you, thought you'd like this. She'd ordered it that same night, and replied simply: thanks, just bought it :) 🩵
He'd sent back a single heart. And that had been that.
She'd finished the book two weeks ago, though she still hadn't told him.
Yerin stared at the screen for a long moment, thumb hovering over the keyboard, the cursor blinking in the empty message box like it was waiting on her, too. Hope London's good. Too casual, too much like she didn't care. A fan asked me to say hi to you today lol. Too much like an excuse to text him at all. I read the book. Too desperate. I miss you. Absolutely not (even if it was the damning, painful truth).
In the end, Yerin locked the phone and set it face-down on the pillow beside her. She closed her eyes , and told herself, for what felt like the hundredth time, that this—whatever this even was—would fade eventually.
It didn't feel like it was fading.
What could she do, really, but think about him.
Yerin was lying in bed again, lost in her thoughts. Again.
Her gaze drifted, unfocused, toward the ISTG cap she'd been gifted today, now sitting on the table by the window, catching a thin slice of streetlight through the gap in her curtains. She wasn't sure why she'd kept it out instead of packing it away with all the other gifts.
Earlier tonight, at the stage door, someone had leaned over the barricade holding out a phone, filming, and said, breathless, "We're so excited for season five!"
"Me too," she'd said, and meant it. She was excited. But if she was honest with herself, lying here in the dark alone, most of that excitement had very little to do with the scripts at all.
Mostly, she was excited to see him again.
It had been crickets from him since. Not a single word. She'd told herself it didn't matter, that filming would start soon regardless, that they'd be back in the same rehearsal rooms and green rooms whether he texted her back or not, that whatever this was could survive a bit of radio silence.
If it was anything at all. That was the maddening part—she couldn't even say what it was. There'd been nothing either of them had ever put into words. Just months of lingering too long after rehearsals, texts that toed some line neither of them acknowledged, a closeness that felt like something without either of them ever calling it that. Not quite friends. Not quite anything else. Two people who'd been dangerously good at not naming what was happening between them, right up until it apparently stopped happening at all.
Yerin almost wished he'd said something back then, drawn some kind of line, so she'd at least know what she was supposed to be missing now. Instead she was left with the humiliating ache of missing something that had never really been anything, something she'd never had a name for.
She wasn't sure she believed that, either, the idea that it had been nothing. Maybe it had just been easy, back then. Convenient. Two people thrown together for months on end, sharing cars and hotel lobbies. Maybe what she'd felt hadn't been about him at all, not really—maybe it had just been the byproduct of exhaustion and proximity and too many long flights sitting shoulder to shoulder, mistaken for something it never actually was.
It was a comforting theory. She almost managed to believe it, some nights.
Tonight was not one of those nights.
She missed the way he used to look at her. Like he was half in love with her already.
She let out a slow breath, dragging both hands down over her face.
Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow she'd focus solely on the show, on New York, on anything that wasn't several thousand miles away and stubbornly, infuriatingly silent.
She almost believed that, too.
"It's beautiful, isn't it?"
"Oh—oh, yes!" Yerin quickly replied.
She was at an art gallery, admiring the paintings while her friends got coffee upstairs, complaining that their legs hurt. She'd been standing in front of one painting for a while now, head tilted slightly, trying to decide what it was about it that had stopped her in her tracks, when a man drifted over, hands stuffed loosely in the pockets of a paint-flecked jacket, sleeves pushed up, exposing his forearms.
"I always end up back at this one," he said, almost to himself, eyes still on the canvas. "There's just something so enchanting about it."
Yerin glanced between him and the painting, charmed despite herself, then let her eyes drop to the flecks of dried paint scattered across his jacket. "Is that a professional opinion, or just yours?"
He looked at her properly for the first time then, and smiled, easy. "Bit of both, probably."
She laughed before she could stop herself, and took the moment to actually look at him properly.
He was, objectively, extremely good-looking. Tall in a way that made her tip her chin up slightly, dark hair pushed back like he'd run a hand through it and not thought about it since, and a confidence that came from being handsome and rich and clever, and knowing it without having to try to prove it. Even the paint-flecked jacket somehow managed to look effortless rather than scruffy. On paper, he was exactly her type. Well—he'd probably be anyone's type.
"Daniel," he said, offering a hand.
"Yerin." She shook it, and noted, with a disappointment she immediately felt ridiculous for, that his accent was American. She wasn't sure what she'd expected instead.
"I'm an art student, so I end up spending a lot of time here," he said, and she caught the colour of his eyes properly for the first time. They were brown and warm. Perfectly nice eyes, the kind plenty of people would happily get lost in.
They weren't green, though.
That shouldn't have mattered. She was aware, distantly, that it was an absurd thing to notice, let alone mind. She'd known this man for what, a minute?
"First time here?" He asked, grinning.
"First time. My friends are getting coffee."
"Lucky me, then." He said it easy, gaze flicking back to the canvas and then, deliberately, back to her. "Guess that means I get you all to myself."
She should have felt something at that. Some sort of babump in her chest.
She felt nothing.
Well—maybe not nothing. She felt the specific frustration of standing in front of a lovely, funny, handsome man and thinking, entirely without permission, about someone several thousand miles away who wasn't even texting her back.
He just isn't Luke, she thought, and hated herself a little for thinking it.
"So," Daniel said, tilting his head. "Can I get your number, or is that—"
"There you are!"
Phia's voice cut across the gallery. She appeared with Lydia trailing just behind her, coffee in hand, eyeing Daniel with open, unashamed interest before her gaze flicked to Yerin, eyebrows raised.
"Sorry, am I interrupting?" Phia asked, in a tone that made clear she knew exactly what she was doing.
"Phia." Yerin shot her a look.
Lydia, at least, had the decency to look slightly more subtle about it, though not by much (she was doing a poor job of pretending to study the painting behind Daniel's head).
"I'm Phia," Phia said, anyway. "Yerin's friend. This is Lydia. We've got a thing to get to, actually. Dinner reservation." She was already looping an arm through Yerin's, steering her half a step away.
"Hi," Lydia offered, giving Daniel a small wave and Yerin a pointed look over his shoulder.
"Right. Of course." Daniel, to his credit, took it in stride, glancing at Yerin with a small, rueful smile. "Nice talking to you. About the painting. And also not the painting."
"You too," Yerin said, and meant it, mostly.
He didn't ask for her number again. She noticed, with a strange, complicated mix of relief and disappointment, that she didn't particularly mind.
Phia and Lydia waited until they were out of earshot before rounding on her.
"Okay," Phia said, eyes wide. "First of all—rude, running into gorgeous strangers without us. Second, why do you look like like that? He was hot."
"Extremely hot," Lydia agreed. "Nice hands. Also, his arms…"
"He was hot," Yerin agreed.
"So?" Lydia said.
Yerin exhaled, glancing back over her shoulder despite herself. Daniel had already drifted back toward the painting, hands back in his pockets, apparently unbothered, already lost in it again.
"So nothing," she said. "He just wasn't—" She stopped herself before she could finish that sentence. "He was fine. It doesn't matter."
Phia and Lydia exchanged a look.
"Uh-huh," Phia said, mercifully letting it go (for now) and steering all three of them toward the exit. "Sure. Come on, we're going to be late."
Phia hadn't lied. They did, in fact, have a dinner booked at an Italian place a few streets over from the gallery, and they were seated now in a corner booth, Yerin twirling carbonara around her fork without much enthusiasm.
"So…" Phia began, resting her chin on her hand, looking pointedly at Yerin .
"So," Yerin echoed, not looking up from her plate.
""Don't 'so' me back. You know exactly what I'm asking." Phia set her glass down with a decisive little clink. "What exactly went on with him?"
"Nothing went on."
"You had the weirdest look on your face when we walked up," Lydia said, not even glancing up from her own plate. "Like you'd rather be anywhere else."
"I didn't."
"You did," Phia said. "He was cute. Whatturned you off?"
Yerin sighed and set her fork down, giving up on pretending the pasta was more interesting than this conversation. Outside, rain was beginning to pour. "He was lovely. Annoyingly good-looking, charming—the whole thing."
"I'm sensing a but."
"There's no but."
"There's a massive but," Lydia said.
Yerin picked her wine glass up mostly to have something to do with her hands. "He just wasn't—" She stopped, turning the stem between her fingers, watching the candlelight catch and swim in the red. "He asked if it was my first time at the gallery. And he said something about getting me all to himself. And I just felt…" She shrugged, a small, helpless motion. "Nothing. I felt nothing."
Phia and Lydia exchanged another one of their looks.
"He has brown eyes," Yerin suddenly blurted out, and regret immediately washed over her, because put into actual words, out loud, it sounded exactly as silly as she'd known it would.
"…Okay," Phia said slowly. "I'm going to need you to explain that, because right now it sounds like you rejected him over eye colour."
"I didn't reject him. You interrupted before I could even give him my number."
"You didn't exactly look devastated about it."
Yerin exhaled, long and slow, and finally admitted the thing she'd been turning over since she'd walked away from the painting. "I just kept thinking, this whole time, that he wasn't—that if it had been—" She shook her head, frustrated at herself, at the sentence she couldn't quite finish. "Never mind. It's stupid."
"If it had been who?" Lydia asked, gently, but still insistent.
Yerin opened her mouth, closed it, and then, apparently, gave up on containing it entirely. "If it had been Luke," she admitted, far too fast. "Not that it means anything. There's nothing between me and Luke. Nothing ever happened, and nothing's ever going to happen. He's just my co-star. We finished shooting season four, he stayed in London, I came here to do the play, and that's—that's it. That's the whole story. The end."
Neither Phia nor Lydia said anything, which was, in its own way, worse than if they had.
"But I can't stop thinking about him," Yerin carried on, quieter now. "No matter how hard I try. I hear some stupid Olivia Dean song on the radio and all I can do is remember him telling me that he loved it, that it reminded him of us—and it was always so painfully hard to tell, when he said 'us,' if he meant Benedict and Sophie, or him and me. I miss the way his hair looked when he'd just woken up from one of his naps, and how annoyed he'd get when I laughed at it. I miss the way he looks—looked—at me. Not even just off camera, but on it too, in one of the hundreds of interviews we did. Like he'd forgotten there was a camera there at all. I miss the way—"
She stopped herself, pressing the heel of her hand briefly against her eye.
"I think about the way he kissed me. Sometimes," she said, so quietly it barely carried over the clink of cutlery around them. "As Benedict. Obviously as Benedict, but it still—" She shook her head. "And sometimes, God, sometimes I let myself imagine it wasn't. That it wasn't Benedict kissing Sophie at all, that it was just Luke, kissing me, and nobody called cut, and it wasn't for a camera or an audience or anyone else. I imagine that he felt it too. That I hadn't made the whole thing up in my head. That he'd felt even the slightest fraction of what I did, standing there under those stupid lights, surrounded by all those people, and just didn't say anything either."
"Yerin—" Phia started.
"And the worst part is I know it's not even mutual," Yerin pressed on. "It was never mutual. He's just like that with everyone. He makes you feel like the only person in the room, and that's just who he is, that's not—"
She huffed out something that wasn't quite a laugh.
"You know, actually, for a bit I thought I wasn't imagining it all. That it was reciprocated. On the last day of press he pulled me aside, and gave me this look, and I actually thought, this is it, he's finally going to say something. I thought everything had been building to that." She shook her head. "And now I'm sitting here, doing this, being this pathetic over a man who probably hasn't thought about me once since I left."
"Yerin—" Phia tried again.
"No, it's true. It's fine. It's just—" She pressed her lips together, blinking hard at the table. "I hate this. I hate how much I long for someone who I convinced myself almost said something he never actually did. I hate that I can't just be normal about it. I hate that I met a perfectly lovely man tonight and all I could think about was someone who isn't even here, who's never going to be here in the way I want him to be, and I still—" Her voice cracked, just slightly, right at the end.
For a moment, none of them said anything at all.
"I just miss us," Yerin said finally, so quietly it barely made it across the table. "Even though there was never really an us to miss."
"Oh, Yerin…" Phia reached across the table and took her hand, and there was something careful in the way she did it. She glanced at Lydia. Lydia glanced back.
"Have you thought about just telling him?" Phia asked , carefully.
"Telling him what? That half the internet has decided we're in love based on a handful of interviews, and somewhere along the way I stupidly started believing them?" Yerin let out a short breath. "No. Absolutely not."
"Yerin." Lydia set her fork down entirely, and leaning forward. "Have you seen the way he looks at you?"
"Lydia—"
"You don't actually know how he feels," Lydia said, quieter now, but no less insistent. "You've decided you do, and you've decided it's nothing, and you've built this whole—this whole case against yourself, and I don't think you've ever once let yourself consider the other option."
"It's not assuming, it's—" Yerin stopped, deflating slightly. "It doesn't matter. It's not happening. I'm not saying anything to him. Can we please talk about something else."
"Okay," Phia said, gently, stepping in, not pushing it any further than that, not yet. "But you're going to see him in a few weeks, right? Once we close and you go back to London to film season five."
Yerin nodded, and Phia squeezed her hand once. "Whatever you decide to do with that, you don't have to figure it out tonight."
Yerin nodded again, not quite trusting her voice, and looked back down at her plate. The carbonara had long gone cold.
She was going to tell him, Yerin thought, settling into her seat on the plane. As soon as she landed, she would confess. Whatever higher being had decided that Yerin should be harbouring these all-consuming feelings could (and should) go straight to hell for it. But at least now, she would be freed from these thoughts, and would stop being such a sad shell of a woman.
The cabin lights dimmed for takeoff. She pressed her palm flat against her thigh, willing it to stop the small, persistent tremor that had nothing to do with turbulence. And if he says nothing back, some smaller, meaner voice piped up in her head, if you watch him work out how to let you down kindly…She pushed the thought away before it could finish. Not now. She wasn't going to allow herself to think like that.
The plane lifted off the ground, and the city fell away beneath her, and Yerin closed her eyes and tried to remember what it had felt like, that first meeting—when all of this had started, when the first hug outside Jess's flat had turned into two years of pretending she didn't notice anything, and didn't feel anything.
She remembered the cold of that evening, the warmth of him anyway, how his arms had folded around her like it was nothing, like it happened all the time, like her heart hadn't done something humiliating in her chest right there on the pavement.
She thought of all the moments after that one, stacked up over time—his hand finding the small of her back to guide her through a crowd, the two of them falling asleep on a plane and waking up with her head on his shoulder, the way he'd go quiet sometimes, just looking at her.
And what would happen to all of that, she wondered, if she said the wrong thing tonight.
Would he still reach for her in a crowd? Would he still fall asleep against her on a flight, or would he sit a careful, deliberately further away from now on, polite and kind and all too unreachable
She'd told herself, every single time, that none of it meant what she wanted it to mean. She'd gotten so good at pretending, in fact—good at laughing at the right moments during interviews, good at letting her hand rest near his without ever quite touching, until he inevitably gave in and closed the distance himself, good at telling herself it was just chemistry, just the job, just two people who happened to be good at theirs.
She was so, so tired of being good at pretending.
Tired enough, finally, to risk the alternative—even the version of the alternative where she lost him entirely, where five years from now she'd hear his name and simply feel nothing, because they'd become strangers who used to know each other well. She'd rather have that, somehow, than keep doing this.
Tonight, she told herself, as the plane soared through the clouds. You tell him tonight. And then, whatever happens, happens. At least you won't be carrying this anymore.
Yerin didn't sleep for the entire flight.