Chapter Text
The hotel lobby smelled like lilies and floor polish.
Sieun had his clipboard pressed against his chest, running through the morning’s logistics with Jihyun from the security team—two vans idling in the underground garage, the airport transfer confirmed for 11:15, Suho’s coffee order already in the car (iced Americano, two shots, no sugar)—when a hand wrapped around his wrist.
Warm. Familiar. Entirely inappropriate for 8:47 in the morning in a lobby full of staff.
“Come on,” Suho said.
No explanation. Just those two syllables, delivered in that honeyed voice, the one he used in interviews when he wanted the host to forget their next question.
Sieun blinked. “We’re not leaving for another fifteen minutes, Suho-ssi. I need to coordinate with—”
“Jihyun knows what to do.” Suho didn’t slow down. His fingers slid from Sieun’s wrist down to his palm, interlacing their fingers with the kind of casual certainty that made Sieun’s brain short out like a blown fuse. “Don’t you, Jihyun?”
Jihyun, the traitor, just nodded and gave Sieun a look that said don’t ask me, I just work here.
The marble floors gleamed under the chandeliers as Suho pulled him toward the revolving doors. Sieun’s loafers squeaked against the polished stone. His clipboard slipped, and he had to clamp his elbow against his ribs to keep it from clattering to the floor.
“Suho-ssi.”
“Mmm?”
“Your hand.”
“What about it?” Suho glanced back, and there it was—that smile. The corner of his mouth tugged up just enough to crinkle the skin beside his left eye. The smile that had launched a thousand ships, a million views, and at least three separate fan wars on Twitter.
Sieun’s face did something he couldn’t control. Heat prickled up the back of his neck.
“You’re holding my hand,” he said.
“Observant.”
“In public.”
“Also observant.” Suho faced forward again, tugging Sieun along like a reluctant kite. “You’re on fire today, Sieun-ah.”
Sieun-ah. Not Sieun-ssi. Not Manager-nim. Sieun-ah, the intimate diminutive that Suho deployed selectively, usually when he wanted something or when he was teasing, which meant approximately always.
The revolving doors loomed ahead. Beyond the glass, Sieun could see shapes. Movement. A crowd. A lot of a crowd.
“Wait.” Sieun dug his heels in. Suho didn’t stop, but he did slow, turning with an expression of theatrical patience. “The other managers. The staff van. I’m supposed to ride with—”
“Change of plans.” Suho’s thumb traced a small circle against the back of Sieun’s hand. “You’re riding with me.”
“Why?”
The smile widened.
And then Suho pushed through the revolving doors, pulling Sieun into the morning sunlight, and the world exploded.
—
The noise hit first.
A wall of screams—high-pitched, overlapping, a tidal wave of voices shouting Suho’s name. Sieun’s ears rang with it. His eyes struggled to adjust to the brightness after the hotel’s dim lobby, and for a disorienting second, all he could process was sound and light and the crushing pressure of too many bodies pressing against the barricades.
Then his vision cleared.
Easily two hundred people lined the hotel’s entrance, crammed behind velvet ropes that the security team had clearly scrambled to set up at some point between Sieun’s 7 AM coffee run and now. Phones raised like offerings. Signs with Suho’s face. Banners with his drama quotes. A sea of lightsticks in pale blue, his official color, waving frantically.
“What—” Sieun started.
Suho lifted their joined hands above his head.
The scream that followed didn’t sound human. It sounded like something tectonic, something geological, the kind of noise a mountain might make if you cracked it in half.
Sieun stood frozen. His arm was extended over his own head now because Suho had raised it there, and he could see their fingers laced together, could see the morning light catching on Suho’s silver ring, could see his own knuckles pale with tension against Suho’s golden skin. The visual didn’t make sense. It was like watching a photograph of someone else, someone who held hands with Korea’s biggest BL actor outside a luxury hotel while two hundred fans lost their collective minds.
“Smile,” Suho murmured, his lips barely moving.
“What is happening right now?” Sieun’s voice came out strangled.
“Smile, Sieun-ah. They’re watching.”
Sieun smiled. His face knew how to do that, at least. Eighteen months as Suho’s private manager had trained his muscles into reflexive professionalism. He smiled for the cameras even as his brain screamed why why why why at a pitch that rivaled the crowd.
Suho lowered their hands. Didn’t let go.
Instead, he turned.
It happened in slow motion.
Suho’s free hand came up, his fingers grazing Sieun’s jaw, tilting his chin upward. Sieun had a split second to register the warmth of that touch, the callus on Suho’s thumb from years of holding scripts and microphones and whatever else he held, and then Suho leaned in and closed the distance between them.
Soft.
That was Sieun’s first thought. Soft. Suho’s lips were softer than they had any business being. They pressed against Sieun’s mouth with a gentleness that felt almost apologetic, like a question being asked instead of a statement being made.
The second thought was: What.
The third thought got lost somewhere in the static.
Suho’s lips moved. Just slightly. A tilt of his head, a micro-adjustment that deepened the kiss by a fraction of a degree, and Sieun’s eyes—which had been wide open, frozen in shock—finally drifted shut.
Not because he was kissing back. He wasn’t. He wasn’t doing anything. He was a body standing on a hotel entrance while a famous actor pressed their mouths together and two hundred phones captured every millisecond.
His eyes closed because the sunlight was too bright through his lids anyway, and because not seeing felt safer than seeing, and because his entire face had caught fire.
Cheeks, he registered dimly. Cheeks are burning. Ears are burning. Neck is—
Suho pulled back.
The crowd’s screaming had reached a frequency that Sieun’s eardrums simply refused to process anymore. It was just noise now. White noise, pink noise, some color of noise that didn’t exist in any audio engineering textbook.
Suho looked at him.
His eyes were dark and warm, the color of black tea with honey, and they held Sieun’s gaze with an intensity that felt performative. That was performative. That was Suho’s drama gaze, the one he used in episode eight confession scenes when the orchestral score swelled and the camera pushed in and the whole nation held its breath.
“Come on,” Suho said, for the second time that morning.
He tugged Sieun toward the black sedan idling at the curb. The door was already open. Beomseok, their driver, stood beside it with an expression of carefully manufactured neutrality.
Sieun’s legs moved without his permission. Muscle memory, maybe. Eighteen months of following Suho wherever he went had wired his body to obey before his brain caught up.
He climbed into the car.
The leather seat was cool through his slacks. The interior smelled like Suho’s cologne—sandalwood and something citrusy, bergamot maybe—and the iced Americano sat untouched in the cupholder, condensation beading on the plastic.
Suho slid in beside him. The door thunked shut, and suddenly the screaming was muffled, distant, a storm heard through double-paned glass. Suho rolled down his window just enough to wave, flashing that smile again, mouthing something that looked like thank you and I love you and please take care of us—the standard fan-service phrases Sieun had heard him recite a thousand times.
Then the window rolled up. The divider between the front seats and the back rose with a soft mechanical hum.
Silence.
The car pulled away from the curb.
—
Sieun stared at the seatback in front of him. Black leather. Stitching along the seams. A small scratch near the headrest that he’d noticed three months ago and never mentioned.
He couldn’t feel his fingertips.
“Sieun-ah.”
Suho’s voice. Soft now, stripped of its performance quality. The real voice, the one he used in hotel rooms at 2 AM when they were reviewing next day’s schedules and Suho was too tired to be charming.
Sieun didn’t respond.
“Hey.” A hand on his knee. Suho’s hand. The same hand that had held his, the same fingers that had tilted his chin. “Look at me.”
Sieun’s head turned. It felt like moving through water.
Suho’s expression had shifted. The teasing smile was gone, replaced by something quieter. His eyebrows were drawn together slightly, and his lips—those lips, the ones that had just been on Sieun’s mouth—were pressed into a line.
“No one told you,” Suho said. Not a question.
Sieun’s voice came out as a rasp. “Told me what.”
A beat of silence.
Suho leaned back against his seat, his hand still resting on Sieun’s knee. With his other hand, he reached up and loosened the collar of his shirt—a cream-colored linen button-down that Sieun himself had steamed at 6 AM.
“The company decided,” Suho said. “Three days ago. We’re dating.”
“We’re—”
“Fake dating.” The clarification came quickly, like Suho wanted to get it out before Sieun could fully process the first part. “A publicity thing. The fans want it, the network wants it, the sponsors want it.” He listed them off with his fingers. “My upcoming drama needs the buzz. Director Park specifically requested it. Said it would ‘authenticate my casting’ or something like that.”
Sieun heard the words. He understood them, individually. Fake. Dating. Publicity. Buzz. But they refused to assemble themselves into meaning.
“We’re dating,” he repeated.
“Fake dating.”
“And no one told me.”
Suho winced. Actually winced. For all his flirtatious bravado, Suho had never been good at delivering bad news. It was one of the first things Sieun had learned about him—that he’d rather deflect with a joke than confront discomfort directly.
“The company said they would inform you.” Suho’s hand tightened on Sieun’s knee, then released. “I assumed they had. When you didn’t say anything this morning, I thought you were just… being professional.”
“Being professional.”
“Sieun-ah, you’re repeating everything I say.”
“Because nothing you’re saying makes sense.”
Sieun’s voice cracked on the last word. Not a sob—he wasn’t going to cry, he refused to cry, there was nothing to cry about—but a crack nonetheless. The kind of vocal fracture that happened when emotions bottlenecked in your throat and couldn’t figure out which direction to go.
Suho heard it. His expression flickered with something that looked almost like guilt.
“Explain it to me,” Sieun said, forcing his voice steadier. “From the beginning.”
—
The car hummed along the highway. Outside the tinted windows, Seoul blurred past in streaks of gray and green. Morning traffic was thinning out as they left Gangnam behind, heading east toward—Sieun didn’t actually know where they were heading. He hadn’t asked. He’d been too busy having his entire understanding of reality reorganized.
“The company monitors online sentiment,” Suho said. He’d shifted in his seat so he was facing Sieun, one leg tucked under him, his elbow resting on the seatback. The posture was casual, but his fingers were tapping against his thigh—a tell. Suho only tapped when he was nervous. “You know how it is. They track hashtags, forum posts, fan discussions. And for the past six months, the most consistent topic has been…”
“Us,” Sieun supplied. The word tasted strange.
“Us.” Suho nodded. “There are compilation videos, Sieun-ah. Hours-long compilations. Every time I’ve made you blush at a press conference or a fan sign or an airport arrival—someone edited them all together. Set them to music. Slow-motion zooms on your face.”
Sieun closed his eyes.
“The last one got eight million views,” Suho added, almost apologetically. “Eight million. The company started doing focus groups. The consensus was overwhelming. The audience wants us to be together. More than they want me to be with any of my costars. More than they want me to be with anyone, period.”
“So the company decided to give them what they want.”
“Exactly.”
“By announcing that we’re dating.”
“Without telling me.”
“I thought they would tell you,” Suho said, frustration bleeding into his voice. “That’s their job. I’m the talent, you’re the management—there are supposed to be procedures. I found out about it in a boardroom with seven executives and two lawyers. They had a PowerPoint, Sieun-ah. Slide transitions and everything.”
A PowerPoint. Sieun’s fake relationship had been presented with slide transitions.
He laughed. The sound that came out was somewhere between a laugh and a wheeze, and Suho’s eyes widened slightly at the noise.
“Sieun-ah?”
“I kissed you,” Sieun said.
“Technically, I kissed you.”
“In front of two hundred people.”
“Closer to three hundred, I think. Did you see the ones on the balcony across the street?”
Sieun opened his eyes and turned to face Suho fully. The actor’s expression was carefully neutral, but his fingers were still tapping. Tap-tap-tap against his thigh. A nervous heartbeat played out in percussion.
“The whole country thinks we’re dating,” Sieun said.
“The whole world, probably. It’ll be trending internationally by now. #SuhoConfirmed or something.”
“Stop.” Sieun held up a hand. “Just—stop. Stop being funny for one minute.”
Suho stopped.
The tapping stopped.
The silence in the car felt enormous.
“I’m sorry,” Suho said. And he sounded it, genuinely sounded it, in a way Sieun rarely heard from him. “You should have known. You deserved to know. I should have checked before I…” He gestured vaguely at his own lips, then at Sieun’s. “That shouldn’t have been how you found out.”
Sieun looked down at his hands. They were clasped in his lap, knuckles white. He’d been gripping them together without realizing it.
“How long?” he asked.
“How long what?”
“How long do we have to do this?”
Suho exhaled. “The contract is for six months. Renewable depending on public reaction. There are termination clauses—if either of us wants to end it early, we can. There are penalties attached, obviously, but the company is offering you a significant pay increase. Separate from your managerial salary. Compensation for the… inconvenience.”
Inconvenience.
Sieun turned the word over in his mind. Inconvenience was a delayed flight or a lost luggage or a coffee order that came with sugar instead of without. Inconvenience wasn’t a nation of sixty million people believing you were in love with your employer.
“I get a say in this,” Sieun said. “Don’t I? They can’t just—I have to sign something.”
“You do.” Suho’s voice was gentle. “You don’t have to do this, Sieun-ah. If you want to refuse, I’ll back you up. I’ll tell them I changed my mind. I’ll use my leverage.” His jaw tightened. “The drama can find another way to get buzz.”
The offer hung in the air between them.
Sieun studied Suho’s face—the sharp jawline that had graced a dozen magazine covers, the eyes that had made millions of viewers cry during his last drama’s finale, the slight furrow between his brows that only appeared when he was genuinely concerned about something.
“Your drama,” Sieun said. “The one that ‘needs the buzz.’ It’s your first lead role outside the romance genre, isn’t it? The thriller with Director Park.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been trying to get that role for two years.”
Suho didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. Sieun knew—Sieun had been there for every meeting, every callback, every anxious late-night phone call where Suho worried he’d be typecast forever as the pretty BL lead who couldn’t do anything else.
“If the buzz dies,” Sieun said slowly, “they might reconsider your casting.”
“That’s not your problem.”
“It becomes my problem if I’m the reason you lose it.”
Suho’s hand moved. It settled on Sieun’s clasped fingers, covering them. His palm was warm, the same warmth that had cupped Sieun’s jaw twenty minutes ago.
“You wouldn’t be the reason,” Suho said. “You’d be the reason I got it in the first place—this whole fake-dating idea exists because of you. Because of those compilations. Because of the way you look at me in public.”
“The way I look at you?”
“You blush.” Suho’s mouth curved, just slightly. The teasing note crept back into his voice despite his obvious effort to suppress it. “All the time. At the smallest things. I say your name and your ears turn pink.”
Sieun’s ears turned pink.
“Like that,” Suho said.
“Stop it.”
“I’m not doing anything. You’re doing it to yourself.”
Sieun pulled his hands free from Suho’s grip and pressed them against his own cheeks, trying to cool the flush that had spread from his ears down to his collarbones. This was humiliating. This was beyond humiliating. A fake relationship he hadn’t consented to, a surprise kiss captured by three hundred phones, and now Suho was looking at him with that expression—that gentle, amused, infuriatingly fond expression.
“Why me?” Sieun’s voice was muffled behind his palms. “You could have fake-dated anyone. One of your costars. An idol. Someone who knows how to handle publicity.”
“The fans don’t want me with a costar or an idol. The fans want me with you.”
“But why?”
Suho was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice had lost its teasing edge.
“Because you’re real, Sieun-ah. You’re not an actor. You’re not performing. When you react to things, you actually react—you can’t fake it. That’s what the compilations captured. Not a character. Just you.”
Sieun lowered his hands. His cheeks were still warm, but the frantic heat was subsiding into something duller. Something resigned.
“I’m not an actor,” he agreed. “I don’t know how to fake date.”
“It’s not that complicated. We hold hands in public. We go on dates that get photographed. I post couple pictures on social media. You look flustered and I look smitten.” Suho shrugged. “Basically what we’ve been doing for eighteen months, plus the hand-holding.”
“And the kissing.”
“And the kissing, yes.” Something flickered in Suho’s eyes. “Was it terrible?”
“What?”
“The kiss. Was it terrible? You look like you’re still recovering from it.”
Sieun’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
“I wasn’t expecting it,” he managed.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It wasn’t… terrible.”
Suho’s smile spread slowly across his face, the way sunrise spread across the Han River during their early-morning drama shoots. “It wasn’t terrible,” he repeated, as if memorizing the words for later.
“That’s not—don’t make this weird.”
“We’re fake dating. It’s already weird.”
The car slowed. Sieun glanced out the window and realized they were pulling into an underground parking garage, the kind that belonged to a broadcasting station or a production company. Concrete pillars slid past the windows. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead.
“Where are we?” Sieun asked.
“KBS building. I have a variety show appearance in an hour.” Suho stretched his arms over his head, the picture of casual ease. “Did you forget? It’s on the schedule you printed out for me yesterday.”
Sieun had forgotten. Somehow, in the chaos of the morning, every professional obligation had been erased from his mind.
“I can’t go in there with you,” Sieun said. “Not after—everyone will have seen the clips by now. The reporters will be waiting.”
“Yes.”
“Suho-ssi.”
“Sieun-ah, you’re my manager. You’re supposed to be with me.” Suho tilted his head. “And now you’re my boyfriend. Even more reason to be with me.”
“Fake boyfriend.”
“They don’t know that.” Suho leaned forward, his face suddenly close to Sieun’s. Close enough that Sieun could count his eyelashes. Close enough that Sieun could smell the mint on his breath from the tea he’d had at breakfast.
“The whole world,” Suho murmured, “thinks I just kissed you because I couldn’t help myself. Because I’m so in love with you that I couldn’t wait one more second. That’s the story they’re telling each other right now. That’s the gif they’re sharing. Suho kisses his manager outside a hotel, spontaneous, romantic, undeniable.”
Sieun’s heart hammered against his ribs.
“So when you walk into that building,” Suho continued, “you need to look like someone who just got kissed for the first time by the person they’ve been secretly wanting for months. Can you do that?”
Sieun’s voice barely worked.
“I don’t know how.”
“Just be yourself.” Suho’s smile softened. “You’re already blushing. You’re already flustered. You’re already exactly what they want you to be.”
The car stopped.
Beomseok's voice came through the intercom: “We’re here, Suho-ssi. Security’s in position. They’re saying there’s a crowd at the main entrance—looks like word got out about the announcement.”
Suho didn’t take his eyes off Sieun’s face.
“Last chance,” he said quietly. “If you want to refuse, refuse now. I’ll get out of this car alone, and I’ll tell them the truth—that I kissed you without warning, that I’m sorry, that there’s no relationship. I’ll take the hit to my reputation. The drama can find another lead.”
Sieun thought about it.
He thought about the two years of effort Suho had poured into landing this role. The late nights memorizing lines for auditions. The acting coaches. The way Suho’s whole face had lit up when the casting confirmation came through, like someone had finally handed him a key to a door he’d been knocking on his entire career.
He thought about the compilation videos, the eight million views, the fans who had spent hours editing together every moment Sieun’s face had betrayed him. How must that look, from the outside? How must he look, reacting to Suho’s presence like a compass needle finding north?
He thought about the kiss. The softness of it. The question it had asked.
“Okay,” Sieun said.
Suho blinked. “Okay?”
“I’ll do it. The fake dating. The six months.” Sieun drew a breath. “But you have to promise me something.”
“Anything.”
“No more surprises like this morning. No more—no more kissing me without telling me first. If we have to do something for the cameras, you warn me. You give me time to prepare.”
Suho considered this. Then he nodded.
“Deal.”
He held out his hand. The same hand that had pulled Sieun through the hotel lobby, the same fingers that had angled his chin toward the morning sun.
Sieun took it.
Suho’s grip was firm and warm, and he shook once before releasing—not letting go so much as trailing his fingers across Sieun’s palm as he withdrew. The contact left a tingling line across Sieun’s skin.
He pushed the door open.
The parking garage erupted with noise—footsteps and shouted questions and the rapid-fire click of camera shutters. Suho stepped out into the fluorescent light, waving once at the assembled reporters, before turning back and extending his hand toward the open car door.
Toward Sieun.
“Ready, jagiya?”
Jagiya. Darling. Sweetheart. A term Suho had never once called him in eighteen months of working together.
Sieun’s face went nuclear.
He took the offered hand, let Suho pull him out of the car and into the chaos, and tried to remember how to breathe. The cameras caught every second of it—his trembling fingers, his blazing cheeks, the way Suho’s thumb stroked across his knuckles in a gesture so tender it looked choreographed.
It wasn’t choreographed.
That was the terrifying part.
Suho leaned down, his lips brushing Sieun’s ear as he murmured, just loud enough to be heard over the noise, “You’re doing great.”
Then he straightened, faced the cameras with his million-won smile, and led Sieun toward the elevator bank like he’d been doing this his whole life. Which, Sieun realized with a jolt, he sort of had. Performing love was practically Suho’s job description.
But as the elevator doors slid shut, sealing them off from the cameras and the questions and the screaming, Sieun caught Suho looking at him.
Not the performance gaze. Not the drama stare.
Something else. Something real.
Suho blinked, and it was gone, replaced by that familiar teasing smile.
“Your ears are still pink,” he said.
“Shut up.”
“It’s been twenty minutes. Do they ever go back to normal?”
“I don’t know,” Sieun said. “This has never happened before.”
“What hasn’t?”
Sieun looked at their reflection in the elevator’s mirrored walls—Suho’s hand still wrapped around his, the space between their bodies smaller than it had been in the car, the residual flush staining his cheeks.
“Any of this,” he said.
The elevator chimed. The doors slid open onto a floor buzzing with staff and stylists and the organized chaos of broadcast prep.
Suho squeezed his hand once, then let go.
But as they stepped into the hallway, Sieun felt the ghost of that grip still printed on his palm, warm and insistent, like a question that hadn’t finished being asked.
A woman emerged from the crowd of production assistants—tall, with chestnut waves cascading over her shoulders, her burgundy blouse cut low enough to draw attention in any room. Elena Vance. The entertainment correspondent who'd been covering Suho's career for the past year, always hovering at the edges of press events with questions that felt a little too personal.
She was already smiling.
The kind of smile that had teeth.
"Suho-ssi," she called out, her voice cutting cleanly through the hallway chatter. "Care to introduce us to your new boyfriend? Officially? "
Suho's stride hitched. Just barely. Just enough for Sieun to feel it.
The cameras weren't rolling yet.
But they would be soon.