Page 125 of When Worlds Collide
“There was a big, fancy party upstairs. It was a ‘masked ball.’” She mimed quotation marks with her fingers and rolled her eyes, as if she couldn’t think of anything more cringe.
The ball.
A trickle of cold fear rolled down my spine. I cast my mind back to that night, trying to remember if I’d noticed anyone paying us special attention, but honestly it had all been such a blur of weirdness to begin with. There had been that altercation with the drunk guy…
I forced my voice to remain neutral, to not betray the sudden way my heart hammered in my chest, to blame whatever expression was on my face on the way my finger currently throbbed in the stream of cold tap water.
“If it was a masked ball, surely there’s no good pictures.”
My mask had been so well-made, I knew it had covered my face, surely there was no way…
Hana grinned, and I was reminded again of piranhas, all teeth and too much glee.
“I dunno about the girl, but the article is claiming to have pictures that make it pretty damn obvious that whoever she is, she isn’t some industry boss babe. They’re apparently very… close.” She waggled her eyebrows at me, and I forced a grin onto my face that felt as fake as the rubber plant in the corner of the room, and I could only hope Hana didn’t notice.
There was always a thin layer of stress stretched taut through me, when I considered what might happen if our relationshipwas discovered. My family, my friends, my whole career was balancing on the edge of a knife. Photographers were everywhere, hell, people with phones were everywhere.
Had we really been so arrogant as to think no one would look closer at our masks?
I had the weirdest urge to scratch every inch of exposed skin, but busied myself instead, trying to inject scepticism into my voice as I said:
“Oh yeah? I’ll believe it when I see it. Are these pictures up?”
“I thought you didn’t care about these gossip rags?” She gave me a sideways glance, and I shrugged.
“I don’t, but I wouldn’t mind seeing the pictures of the party. You know, see how the other side live, and all that.”
I forced a laugh, feeling a measure of relief when Hana huffed and said, “I worked that night. Only downstairs, mind you, and lemme tell you the amount of pompous wankers that walked through that door. I was almost gassed by the amount of perfume I was forced to inhale.” Her accent always seemed to come out a little more when she was bitching about something – which was honestly kind of often.
“Anyway,” she continued on, as if I’d prompted her, “I reckon it’s Lee Hyejin, you know – the pretty one from PYT? There’s always been rumours about those two.” Hana poked her tongue out of the side of her mouth, catching it between her teeth in the way she sometimes did when she thought she was being cute. I turned back to watching the water stream over my finger, even though it had long since gone cold.
“Oh yeah? Wasn’t she also there, though? How could the masked person be Hyejin if Hyejin was also there?”
“I thought you didn’t pay any attention to this shit?”
Hana’s eyes narrowed on me, and I turned away, shrugging my shoulders.
“I don’t. I saw footage of it when I was researching the company before starting.”
“Ah right,” she said easily, and just as I thought she’d drop the subject–
“Hey!” she exclaimed, as if suddenly struck by inspiration. “What if the masked girl was his main squeeze, and he’s cheating on her with Lee Hyejin? You know these idol types – all that pent up emotion, all those sweaty dance sessions… I’m telling you, those two definitely have some history, I can personally attest to having seen them together on more than a few occasions.”
My head snapped round to look at her, but she wasn’t looking at me, she was swiping on her phone.
“Look.” She pushed the phone so close to my face, I had to rear back to save my nose.
When my eyes refocused, I saw a grainy image on the screen of what was unmistakably Jihoon, stepping out of an elevator, side-by-side with… yup, that was Lee Hyejin, and even in sweats, she was the kind of stunning that made you want to hate her. Just a little. Looking closer, Jihoon was also in sweats, a towel slung around his neck. They were looking at each other, smiling. Had they been in the gym together?
I frowned and couldn’t help myself when I asked, “When was that?”
Hana grinned broadly, tucking her phone back into her pocket.
“Hmm, not that long ago, maybe just before his birthday? So, October?”
My stomach knotted. October. His birthday was the Halloween weekend when he’d come to LA. When we’d slept together for the first time.
Hana was speaking again, but I didn’t hear her over the rushing in my ears. Jihoon had always maintained that he barely knew Lee Hyejin, but that photo certainly implied they were atleast friendly. Even though I knew it could be rationalised in hundreds of different ways – I mean, they worked in the same building, for fuck’s sake, they were bound to cross paths – I couldn’t help the way my jaw clenched. I felt a cold bead of sweat roll down my spine, and a sick feeling settled in the bottom of my stomach. Had Mr Park not come into the break room right then, I’m not sure I would have been able to pull myself out of the spiral I’d been circling down. But he had, and I’d turned off the tap, coffee forgotten, and gone to stand with the other juniors as we got our assignments for the day.
