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Juhoon stared intently at his motionless reflection.
His eyes only ever scrutinized his imperfections so it was hard not to refusewhat the standing mirror painted honestly. It magnified all of Juhoon’s flaws and insecurities he was born with.
His hair had been combed with meticulous precision, each strand deliberately arranged before he had finally allowed a single piece to fall forward, securing it with a small amount of gel. Juhoon had been experimenting with different hairstyles recently, although most attempts ended with him abandoning the idea altogether.
However, a small — almost embarrassingly hopeful — fragment of him had whispered that he had to try this one.
It was Eom Seonghyeon’s trademark.
Seonghyeon had worn the style so frequently that it had almost become inseparable from his image. It appeared in an overwhelming majority of their concerts, photoshoots and promotional schedules with the same effortless perfection that made it look as though the hairstyle had been designed exclusively for him.
The other members teased him relentlessly for it, particularly Keonho, who seemed to derive an almost childish delight from reaching across and ruining Seonghyeon’s carefully arranged hair. It always provoked the immediate, indignant reaction he had evidently been hoping for.
It happened so often that it had become something of a ritual between them, the two inevitably ending up wrestling across the floor or collapsing onto the sofas, each attempting to retaliate by further disheveling the other’s appearance whilst everyone else laughed at their expense.
Juhoon always watched from somewhere nearby, wearing the same practised smile he had perfected over the years. The smile which curved obediently at the corners of his mouth, it never quite reached his eyes.
He understood that he was supposed to find it amusing, and that he was expected to laugh along with everyone else. So he did, because the alternative would make himself look conspicuous by becoming the only person in the room who appeared uncomfortable with their affection.
If Juhoon tried the hairstyle himself, would Keonho look at him differently?
The thought was humiliatingly simple, almost childish in its desperation, yet it had burrowed so deeply into his mind that he could no longer dismiss it. The casual affection Keonho seemed to give Seonghyeon so freely, the teasing touches, bright laughter and unguarded smiles that appeared whenever they were together, would someday be directed towards Juhoon too.
If only he could somehow become someone worth looking at.
Every look Keonho gave Seonghyeon seemed to draw an involuntary ache through Juhoon’s chest. It’s a quiet clenching sensation of something tender and deeply buried.
What he wanted more than anything to get a grain of Keonho’s attention.
He wanted Keonho to look at him and laugh because of something he had said, wanted to be the reason those cute dimples appeared. Juhoon desperately tried to think of any personal traits he had that could possibly hold Keonho’s attention for longer than a fleeting moment and he always failed.
He leaned closer towards the mirror, attempting to imitate the exact proportions of Seonghyeon’s hairstyle, adjusting the front strand and angling his head from one side to the other. Juhoon attempted to convince himself that there might be some miraculous perspective that could make him look somewhat decent.
It didn’t — Juhoon never believed in miracles anyways.
The style looked elegant on Seonghyeon because the boy himself was beautiful; on Juhoon, it looked contrived, awkward and vaguely ridiculous. It’s another reminder that there were certain things the world seemed willing to forgive on beautiful people that became glaringly obvious on everyone else.
Lately, everything looked wrong on Juhoon.
Even the clothes he wore seemed to conspire against him.
The outfit he had borrowed from James, for instance, had looked effortlessly stylish when James had worn it. The fabric falling naturally against his frame and complimenting his proportions and features.
James was always offering Juhoon clothes he had ordered online, insisting that he was sure they would suit him, and Juhoon appreciated the gesture more than he ever admitted aloud. The material was high quality, soft enough that it did not irritate his sensitive skin, and there was objectively nothing wrong with the clothing itself.
The problem was him.
It had to be.
How was Juhoon allowed to debut with Cortis looking like this?
The question had begun to haunt him with increasing frequency, especially whenever he stood beneath bright lights or caught sight of himself unexpectedly in a reflective surface.
He had genuinely begun wondering whether his face had changed somehow, whether the features he had once been capable of ignoring had gradually become distorted into something impossible to look at without criticism.
He had gained weight during his attempts to build muscle. Instead of achieving the defined physique he had imagined, Juhoon only added softness to his arms, and an obvious roundness to his stomach that made him want to shrink into the floor and vanish.
He wanted arms like Seonghyeon’s, particularly the sculpted biceps that fans constantly praised whenever the group performed in sleeveless clothing, their comments overflowing with admiration over how attractive they found him.
Juhoon wondered what Keonho thought whenever he looked at him, whether he considered him ugly and merely tolerated his presence because they were members of the same group.
Keonho had once said that he liked people who could make him happy, and Juhoon had carried those words around with him ever since, turning them over repeatedly inside his head until they had acquired an importance they had never been intended to possess.
He could not remember the last time he had made Keonho genuinely laugh.
A smile, perhaps.
But never the breathless, helpless laughter Keonho gave the other members, the kind that made his shoulders shake and his eyes water until he had to lean against someone simply to remain upright.
Juhoon was grateful for every smile he received from him regardless, because whenever Keonho smiled radiantly, it felt as though the rain had abruptly ceased and the clouds had parted just enough to let sunlight through.
“What are you doing?”
The voice abruptly shattered the fragile stillness of his thoughts, and Juhoon startled before immediately running a hand through his hair, ruining the careful arrangement he had spent several minutes attempting to perfect.
He did not need to look.
It was Keonho.
The reflection beside his own confirmed it moments later, Keonho standing there with an unmistakably amused expression on his face. Juhoon kept his eyes fixed stubbornly upon the mirror, although every few seconds he allowed himself a furtive glance towards Keonho’s reflection. He’d only to discover that Keonho was already looking at him, there was probably something on his face he missed.
“Are you trying Seonghyeonnie’s hairstyle?”
Keonho’s tone was teasing rather than malicious, and he leaned closer, reaching towards Juhoon’s face to push an unruly strand of hair away from his forehead.
Keonho’s face was so soft and the gesture should have been comforting. It didn’t even register to Juhoon actually, none of Keonho’s actions towards him did. It was just how his brain functioned.
Instead, it sent a confusing rush of emotion twisting through Juhoon’s stomach.
His heart raced at the proximity, yet simultaneously seemed to sink beneath the weight of his own interpretation of the moment. His mind had already decided what Keonho’s expression meant before he could stop it.
He was mocking him.
He thought the hairstyle looked ridiculous. He was politely mocking Juhoon for believing, even momentarily, that he could imitate someone as attractive as Seonghyeon.
The worst part was that Juhoon knew, somewhere beneath all those intrusive thoughts, that he was probably inventing half of it.
Knowing that did not make the thoughts disappear.
Every smile Keonho gave him could become evidence of pity; every glance could become an assessment; every casual touch could be interpreted as nothing more than an act of kindness towards the group member who needed it most.
“You know, the haircut itself is kind of ugly in general,” Keonho laughed softly, apparently unaware of the storm he had accidentally unleashed inside Juhoon. “I feel like only Seonghyeon can actually pull it off.”
It was an innocent comment.
Juhoon knew deep down it was innocent.
His mind nevertheless seized to it, like it had been intentionally crafted to confirm every insecurity he had spent years cultivating.
He absently fiddled with the hem of his shirt, keeping his gaze lowered as he shrugged.
“I just thought I’d try it out.”
He forced his voice into something casual, something convincingly indifferent, because the last thing he wanted was to appear miserable in front of Keonho.
He did not want to contaminate the moment with his insecurities, refused to have Keonho realise that a harmless joke had somehow managed to penetrate beneath all the layers of indifference Juhoon had constructed around himself.
Keonho must have noticed something nevertheless, because his expression softened almost immediately. Juhoon was looking at a speck on the floor, not even noticing how keonho was going to reach to cup his face but settled lower.
“That’s okay, that’s totally fine. It’d suit you anyways.”
His hand found Juhoon’s shoulder in a reassuring gesture, warm and familiar. Juhoon could not bear the implication that he needed “reassuring” in the first place, could not stand the possibility that Keonho had seen straight through him and recognised the pathetic insecurity he had tried so desperately to conceal.
He shrugged his shoulder away and walked past him, leaving the bathroom without another word.
The moment the door closed behind him, humiliation flooded through him.
What had possessed him to believe, even for a fleeting moment, that Keonho might look at him the way he looked at Seonghyeon?
There was a reason Keonho and Seonghyeon were so frequently praised for their appearances, their photographs circulated endlessly by fans who seemed capable of finding beauty in every angle and movement.
Juhoon had never received that kind of attention.
He simply faded into the background, overshadowed by Martin and James, whose respective talents and personalities naturally drew people towards them.
Juhoon was simply there.
Perhaps that was all he had ever been.
The thought carried him backwards through memory, towards the beginning of everything, back to the day he had joined the company almost two years before their eventual debut.
He had met Keonho then.
Even now, Juhoon could remember him with clarity.
Keonho had been beautiful even back then, possessing the same peculiar charm that seemed capable of drawing people towards him without conscious effort.
He had shown Juhoon around the building when they first met, patiently guiding him through unfamiliar corridors and introducing him to the small sample of projects the others were working on.
His friendliness had been so natural that Juhoon had found himself listening when Keonho encouraged him to hear their music, and he had liked what he heard enough to agree to join the company.
Perhaps that was where everything had begun.
The training process had been brutal.
Juhoon had trained at unreasonable hours, learning how to sing while simultaneously attempting to catch up with people who had already spent years developing skills he possessed only in their most rudimentary form.
He had taught himself the basics because the alternative—to remain deadweight—was unbearable to him.
Everyone else was and always has been miles ahead.
Juhoon was always trying to catch up.
And even after all those years, some part of him still felt as though he were standing at the back of the room, trying to prove that he deserved to remain there.
That sense of uselessness had never truly disappeared; it had merely changed shape.
Now, every mistake he made on stage remained lodged inside his memory long after everyone else had forgotten it. A missed note, a poorly executed movement, an awkward expression caught by a camera—each tiny imperfection could be replayed by his mind with merciless precision until a moment lasting less than a second became evidence that he was fundamentally inadequate.
It was as though his own mind had turned against him, patiently collecting ammunition and waiting for the day his carefully maintained composure finally fractured.
The resentment was always there, bubbling beneath the surface, festering quietly beneath his easygoing facade, waiting for the smallest disturbance to make everything overflow.
That was the frightening thing about Juhoon.
What even is the possibility that Keonho might even like boys.
Juhoon just thought so because Keonho was so affectionate with Seonghyeon, so instinctively drawn towards him, that some foolish part of Juhoon had begun to wonder whether perhaps he could manufacture the same affection by becoming more like him.
If he changed enough things about himself, perhaps one day Keonho might look at him and see something worth wanting.
Later that night, Juhoon lay beneath the blankets staring at the ceiling, his body refusing to surrender to the stillness that sleep demanded.
According to James, he had been moving restlessly for several nights, twisting beneath the covers with the restless agitation of a trapped animal and Juhoon suspected James was right about the cause.
His dreams had become unbearable.
They almost always revolved around whatever occupied his thoughts during the day, and lately that meant Keonho had somehow managed to infiltrate even the few hours in which Juhoon was supposed to be free from himself.
Annoyingly, even his subconscious could not recreate Keonho accurately.
Dream-Keonho was never quite right.
He could not replicate the warmth of his honeyed skin, nor the precise darkness of his tousled brown hair, nor the particular brightness that seemed to exist in his eyes whenever he smiled.
The real Keonho possessed an almost ethereal quality that Juhoon’s imagination could imitate only imperfectly, and maybe that was fitting because even in his dreams, Juhoon could never quite reach him.
“Juhoonie.”
James’s voice startled him from his thoughts.
At this hour, James was usually already asleep, so Juhoon turned his head towards him and found him staring across the darkness, his expression unusually attentive.
“Something wrong?”
Juhoon’s eyes drifted back towards the ceiling.
There was a small discoloured mark near one corner, subtle enough that most people would never have noticed. He wanted to scratch it away, wanted to somehow erase the evidence of its existence, because the spot did not belong there.
It did not fit.
Juhoon hated things that did not fit.
For some reason, Juhoon found himself wanting to return to the question James had asked before, wanting to discuss something infinitely more complicated than an imperfection on the ceiling.
“Have you ever liked anyone?”
James became still.
Juhoon rarely asked personal questions about him, and although James had always appreciated the privacy between them, there was a part of him that had occasionally wished Juhoon would show a little more interest in his life.
James wondered if Juhoon would ask about the things that existed beyond rehearsals, schedules and music.
“Not really,” James admitted quietly. “I’ve been training for a while, so there hasn’t exactly been much time for that. And with our second EP dropping, we’ll probably start promotions soon, then maybe tour afterwards.”
Juhoon hummed thoughtfully, his gaze remaining fixed upon the ceiling.
“Does it take a while for you to love someone?”
James considered the question.
“I guess it does,” he eventually replied. “I’d want to know who they actually are first, you know? Their genuine personality, what they like, what they’re interested in, what kind of person they are when nobody’s watching. If I really click with them, I don’t think it matters what they look like or what they are.”
Juhoon listened quietly.
His eyes remained closed, but the pressure behind them continued to build until he could feel moisture gathering along his lashes.
The words were comforting in a way he did not know how to explain.
Perhaps that was why they hurt.
“Do you love anyone?”
James’s voice came again, softer this time, and Juhoon opened his eyes, turning towards him.
In the darkness, he could barely make out James’s silhouette, only the pale suggestion of his bleached-blond hair standing out against the shadows.
“Love’s a strong word, don’t you think?”
James gave a quiet laugh.
“That isn’t a no, Juhoonie.”
Juhoon allowed himself a small, reluctant chuckle, his expression softening despite himself.
“I do.”
The admission seemed to catch James entirely off guard.
He shifted upright, suddenly intrigued, and Juhoon could almost imagine the questions multiplying inside his head: who was it, how long had he known them, when had this happened, how had Juhoon somehow found the time to fall in love while simultaneously surviving the relentless demands of training and debut preparations?
James asked none of them.
Instead, he settled back into the silence, allowing the confession to exist between them without forcing Juhoon to explain it.
And Juhoon was grateful.
Because there were some feelings that became infinitely more frightening once spoken aloud, and Keonho’s name was one of them.