Chapter Text
I knew that I should have asked for more money.
Even when the k-pop company offered a number that seemed obscene at the time, I still should have asked for more. I didn't realize that fully until the moment I found myself watching Sangmin, a member of the biggest k-pop band in the world getting a box braid bob installed.
Not cornrows. Not even dreads. Box braids. In 2021. He just kept yelling about the Good Burger movie, and I cursed myself for making the recommendation. I thought he'd find the movie silly and funny, not inspirational. My official title was international pr consultant but mostly I was a fixer, making sure that nobody did anything too offensive. I was mostly good at it but Sangmin was my problem child.
"It was a wig!" I said, totally in English, which I knew he didn't understand, but I was desperate." Kel Mitchell was wearing a wig!" He didn't understand me but nodded and smiled anyway.
He needed to be in the car in one hour with a suit and without the braids. He sat there in his tank top, his permed hair in a poof. I'd been there for an hour, trying desperately to convince him to stop. My translator had the day off and was on vacation so I was on my own. I looked down at his hair. The back was almost done.
"God, how do you know how to even do these so good? The rows are so straight!" The random elderly woman doing his braids smiled, not knowing what the hell I was saying beyond "good." She gave me a thumbs up. Her kind smile and thumb triggered another panic in me.
"You have to take them out. Now." I yelled into my phone, and the phone translator spewed out what I knew was nonsense.
"It's cool, right?" Sangmin said, staring proudly in the mirror. "Retro!"
"No!" That's a word I picked up quickly in Korean. I use it often. "Not cool! It’s offensive! Remember our conversation the other day?”
He reached out for his phone I'd stolen from him to keep him from sending out a selfie to his 20 million followers. I took a few steps out of his reach, and he frowned.
Fuck.
A few moments later, the elevator doors opened, and a man who looked a little older than Sangmin strolled in. He wore all black, his hair short, and he had a swagger about him. Okay, sexy man. Are you a friend or another obstacle? I’d already gotten rid of Sangmin’s other “friends” who were enthusiastic supporters of his current look. Sexy man made eye contact with me, his eyebrow arched as if in question before his eyes landed on Sangmin.
"Hyung!” Sangmin said, before launching into fast Korean, I couldn't follow. The sexy man’s eyes widened in horror, looking at Sangmin’s head. Finally, someone who seemed to understand the fuckery of the situation. He stopped short in front of Sangmin, and it was time for me to play body language translator. My Korean was about at the level of three-year-old, so I spent a lot of my time trying to read cues. Sangmin looked properly scolded, his arms crossed. They went on this for a while, and Sangmin looked defiant. Mystery sexy man started to get upset, his jaw tightening and his lips in a hard line. He was very distracting.
He felt my eyes on him because he paused and looked over at me. I hiccuped, a quirk I picked up in my youth when I was caught doing something wrong and tried to not gawk. His face softened and his eyes crinkled. "Sorry," he said. "I'm Namjoon. I'm a childhood friend of Sangmin's, and I'm going to the gala with him because he's one of my favorite artists, and he….." He kept talking, and it took me a moment to process it. ENGLISH. He was speaking my mother tongue!
Before all the words fully left his mouth, I launched myself at him. "You speak English?!" My voice was a mixture of a scream and a whisper like I hiding from a T-Rex in a Jurassic Park sequel. Sexy Namjoon smirked in a way that felt like a warning. I ignored it. All I could think about was him being my savior. I also wondered what Jeff Goldblum was doing right now.
"Yeah," he said, smiling down at my hands that were clutching both of his biceps without me even knowing. I released my vice-like grip. "I speak English." Why did his voice get deeper?
"Thank fuck, can you help me talk to him?!" I said, my voice decidedly unsexy. I still sounded like a terrified chicken.
"Yeah." He smirked again. "I can help." Who smirks at a time like this? And was that a dimple?
----
30 minutes later and Namjoon, the kind elderly woman and I were all unbraiding his hair. The threat of being canceled and a little white lie about Justin Bieber is what it took. I can't imagine how it looked, all of us unbraiding his hair. I'd seen a lot in my job, but this was still one of the strangest things I'd ever done. Just me being here was embarrassing. I snuck another look at Namjoon. He was focused but wasn't doing much, attempting to unbraid the same braid for the last 5 minutes. I didn’t say anything because watching him so focused was the only bit of entertainment I had. At one point, he caught me looking at him, and he shrugged, helpless. Sweet.
A little later, Namjoon and I looked on while Sangmin got dressed and picked earrings. "You are really good," Namjoon said to me after a few minutes of silence. I turned to him, my neck feeling hot. "The way you were able to talk him out of it like that. You have a way with words. I tried talking to him, but he was so stubborn."
"Not my words. Your words. And yeah I guess that's my job." I said, still not looking at him. Sangmin held up a cross earring and a simple drop style for inspection. I pointed at the cross and Namjoon pointed at the drop earring. He chose the cross. "Thank you. For your help. I don't know what I would have done without you."
"It's no big deal. I was afraid too. I have my own history with inappropriate hairstyles." He offered and I finally looked at him then. This didn't shock me. My time in Korea had shown me that many Korean men had an afro or dread phase in their past somewhere. "I obviously learned from it." He rubbed the back of his head, and he looked embarrassed. I stared at him for a moment, taking him in entirely for the first time. He was a little taller than me, which was a feat, considering I was taller than most people. The biceps I knew about, but I could really appreciate them from this angle. A flash of something caught my attention before I could go too deep into my assessment, and I turned to Sangmin.
Sangmin had a mouth full of diamond teeth. "Jesus Christ, Sangmin. Where did you get those? Wait, is that real?" I yelled. Namjoon instantly started translating for me, and he smacked Sangmin on the side of the head for emphasis. It was the sexiest thing I'd ever seen. I looked at him with what I knew were heart eyes. "Can I just take you with me everywhere?" The words tumbled out of my mouth, and I instantly wanted to take them back. Fleeting panic-induced love does weird things to people.
He gave a deep throaty laugh and a huge smile that took over his whole face. I shook myself out of my Namjoon-induced haze and turned my attention to Sangmin. "Okay, this has nothing to do with Good Burger at all?!! We talked about this!" Namjoon translated for me, and I ignored my heart thumping in my chest.
---
The museum gala went off mostly without a hitch. Even though Sangmin didn't have any type of self-control off-camera, he knew just what to do once the cameras showed up. Standing up there with his members making hearts and posing, you'd never know he had a head full of box braids before this. The worst of the work was behind me and I mostly just followed the group members around and made sure they didn't do anything weird around the statues. I held my breath through the Native art exhibit. Sangmin did take a photo of an artifact as inspiration for a tattoo, but I'd deal with that later.
The biggest mystery was Namjoon, who I'd see around the exhibits…always with a crowd of people around him. He was some kind of famous, but I wasn't sure what.
Throughout the night, I managed to get a few answers here and there before he'd get pulled away by his adoring fans. We'd steal moments of small talk when we'd randomly find ourselves at the same painting. He was a professor of philosophy and writing at the university, specializing in music studies and analysis. He used to be in a rap group with Sangmin. He was back in Seoul from America for a few years.
At the end of the night, the two of us found ourselves side by side again, loading Sangmin up in the van, along with the waiter and waitress he decided to take home from the party. With their NDAs in hand, I felt like my night was finally over. "Want to come?" Sangmin said, his English suddenly really good. I wasn't sure who he was talking to -- me or Namjoon, but we both shook our heads. He shrugged and shut the door.
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding, settling into the nearby bench and just relaxing for a bit. Namjoon sat down next to me and we were shoulder to shoulder, our knees barely touching. The contact felt intense, so I took the opportunity to ask the question I'd been dying to ask. "So, are you famous or something?"
He got shy and smiled at his feet. This was a habit for him.
"I wrote this pretty popular book. It was on the New York Times list. First Korean book to do it." He said. "I guess that could be it." Suddenly I had so many more questions. I was ready to launch my attack.
"Oh! So you lived in America a long time or are you...." He put his hand on my knee, which instantly shut me up. It was a reflexive thing, I could tell because he pulled his hand away quickly.
"You ask a lot of questions." He said, smoothing his hands on his knees like he was trying not to touch me. "But you won't let me ask you anything….why?" His tone was playful, but I could tell there was something else there. I felt suddenly vulnerable. Nobody had ever clocked my questioning before.
"Why don't you like answering questions? Do you have something to hide?" I said, trying to match his playful tone, but my tone was a little too airy. Namjoon's eyes widened a bit. Something was shifting and changing between us. He looked at me as if deciding something.
"No, do you?" He said, making a swirl shape on my thigh, not looking at me. I tried to hide how my breath caught at the contact, but I'm sure he noticed it because he stalled for a little before making more circles. My brain wasn't working anymore.
"Other than a fear of intimacy and vulnerability with a healthy dose of distrust of men and a desire for control, no, not really. You?" It poured out of me before I could even catch it. He gave me a big wide grin and alarms went off in my head.
"Just a fear of failure, crippling self-doubt, and a fundamental belief that something bad is gonna happen." He said it simply like he was talking about the weather. We looked at each other for a moment, his eye contact intense. There was something about his face that scared me like he was really seeing me. It cracked me open.
“Go ahead. Ask me something.” I said, feeling goosebumps form on my arms just by saying it. There was a pause and he sat back and crossed his arms as if lost in thought. I felt nervous. Why did I feel nervous?
“What’s your name?” He said finally and it was totally sincere, my heart felt like it was gonna burst. I laughed at the question. My laugh was hysterical, I could hear it but I couldn’t stop it. “Sorry I don’t mean to get so personal! Nobody referred to you as your name and I kept wanting to ask and I wasn’t sure how to do it and —-is that too personal? Am I moving too fast? I can pull back!” It was all so ridiculous.
I told him my name and he repeated it as if committing it to memory. “I like it.” He said. “Thank you for sharing it with me, I know that was hard for you.” I shoved him in the arm. Smartass. He said my name again and I tried not to show how much him saying my name affected me. This was absurd.
"Okay, one more question," I said, and my voice still had too much air. I sounded way too affected by him, and that's because I was. We were really close now and i felt insecure about the sound of my breathing. I needed to break it somehow.
"Okay." His gaze softened. "Ask me anything." His tone was deep but still a whisper. Why can’t he leave his sexy voice alone for just a moment?
"Are you open-minded?" I tried to be serious when I said it, but I felt a smile creeping up, around the edges. He laughed, a genuine full-body laugh that took over his face. "Do you want some ramen? Is that what the kids say?” I added. He laughed some more, and I exhaled at the release of energy. It worked, back on safe ground.
He looked at me then, his gaze suddenly serious, his jaw clenched. My mouth went dry. I hadn't really thought this through. "Yeah, I love ramen." His voice was surprisingly soft, and he was staring at my lips. I licked them instinctively, and he narrowed his eyes at me. “You?” Oh shit, this was happening.
I felt myself nodding but it wasn’t enough.
“Is that a yes?” His voice was the lowest I’d ever heard it and I shivered a little. I needed to get it together. “Do you want some ramen?” How did he manage to make it sound like that?
"Yeah. I could eat.” I said, standing up, finding my confidence. Namjoon was hot, and he was sweet, and I could give myself this. We didn't have to ask each other questions. He stood up too and we just were there for a moment, so close I resisted the urge to take a step back.
"Okay." He said, not breaking eye contact with me. He grabbed my hand, lacing my fingers in his, and turned to the street. His skin felt warm and I was already feeling a little dizzy. He lifted his other hand up, trying to hail a cab.
The universe sensed our urgency because one showed up immediately. He opened the door, and I rushed in, him coming in behind me. I leaped as the door shut behind me and we were suddenly in the back of the cab, which felt too small.
"Okay." He said, barely a whisper.
"Okay." I responded. He gave me one of those smiles before talking to the driver in Korean. I looked down and realized he was still holding my hand.