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Rumi thought she understood how to grieve the dead.
She had no clear memory of her mother outside of the glossy magazine prints she kept carefully pressed into binders beneath her bed, hair perfectly curled and styled, a thick mask of creamy foundation and perfect eyeliner applied by a small army of makeup artists and designers. She understood there was a certain chromatic truth to idols in magazines, an artistic purification overseen by hundreds of executives and production assistants. Celine took her to lit incense at her gravesite on the anniversary of her death. Of her father, she knew even less, but sometimes she stared at the purpled stripes across her arms and chest and wondered if their pattern matched his, like a tiger's stripes matched their kits.
After the Honmoon is restored, Rumi sees him everywhere.
She sees him in line at the convenience store, broad-shouldered and holding two packets of konjac. She very nearly approaches him, but when she blinks, it's a different man entirely, now squinting past her baseball cap and mask as if he recognized her for who she was.
She swears she sees him at the photoshoot for their newest album, carrying vases of flowers from set to set. She very nearly grabs Mira's bejeweled arm, "is that—?" but when her heavy lashes flutter, it's the same production assistant from the last photoshoot, and Bobby is waving his hands to get the photographer's attention. "You've exhausted them," he criticizes. "Rumi, take five, and please actually rest this time."
She sees him in dramas and music videos, and then sometimes she literally does see him, stumbling on articles online with photos of the Saja Boys like missing posters, Where Are They Now? Like a bolt of lightning, the boys had captured millions of hearts and went just as quickly. Some called it a fad, an experiment from some talent agency, a viral sensation gone overnight. But there are still broken light sticks littering the trashcans, photocards and glossy magazine posters stuffed into Zoey's trashcan.
Ripped and dotted with dart holes, Rumi steals Jinu's poster and tacks it up inside her closet door. She swears she's not hiding anything from Zoey and Mira, not anymore—
But this half-born love feels too private to share with anyone, for a man whose soul was lost four hundred years ago.
The honmoon glimmers beneath her outstretched fingers when she reaches for it, humming in vibrato with harmony and protection. They're talking comeback tour dates, outfits, choreography, lyrics. All the songs that Rumi writes come out sad and plaintive and whining, but it's exactly the kind of thing to counteract Mira's sharp edges and Zoey's bombastic bars.
"Where are you even getting all this from?" Zoey asks admiringly. "You're digging deep!"
"I uh, just really liked this drama I've been watching," Rumi lies—hating herself for falling into the pattern still. They'd promised not to hide anything from each other anymore, hadn't they?
It was one thing to be half-demonic herself, to be entrapped by Jinu's beauty—
It was another altogether to mourn him with every breath.
But she hid her darkest secrets from Huntrix for decades; Celine's greatest lesson is harder still to forget. It's easy enough to bare her skin and stripes to the world.
When she opens her door to pull out a set for her next choreo practice, Jinu's dark eyes watch her in the shadows.
And then there was the matter of the tiger.
All the demons were supposed to be gone, but it was still sleeping in her room, watching her with those enormous orange eyes like a statue. All her clothes were covered in blue fur, and she decided at least if she would hide her grief, she couldn't hide the ninety kilo monster drooling all over her sheets from Huntrix.
"Does it uh," Mira glared at the tiger, which was methodically trying to right a tipped over soju bottle, "eat anything?"
"It probably eats souls," Zoey speculates. "We should really get rid of it. Yeah. Definitely. Tomorrow."
But in the morning, Rumi wakes up with her face half-buried in the tiger's soft belly fur, and that afternoon she finds Zoey dozing with the creature as she scrolls through her TurtleToks. Mira glares daggers at it every time it draws near her, but it becomes something of a pet.
The three-eyed crow still stares at her from her balcony.
"Where did he go?" she asks the crow.
The crow screams with its barbed tongue, and gives her no answer.
Between the girls and Jinu's familiars, the penthouse is too crowded with memories. As Rumi spends her morning braiding her hair, she decides to make an escape of it.
Any idol worth their salt knows how to slip around Seoul without being discovered. No makeup, a hat, glasses, a facemask—it was too easy sometimes. Even if her mother was walking the streets of Seoul, would she have recognized her, bare-faced and older? No one pays her any mind on the train as she stares out the window at the passing buildings and high-rises, and the attendant at the entrance of the aquarium doesn't look twice at her as he takes her coins and passes her a ticket.
It feels a little blasphemous, coming here without the girls. Zoey dragged them to an aquarium for every country they toured.
But as schoolchildren rush past and mothers push their strollers and couples whisper to each other, it feels otherworldly tranquil in the sapphire waters, a world of windows into different universes, creatures that only existed in aquamarine stasis. She drifts from aquarium to aquarium, the lush greenery of the freshwater aquariums with rainbow fish and tetras and tiger-striped corydoras swirling in ancient synchronicity. They school together like it's second-nature, the way a crowd effortlessly weaves around a traffic accident.
The tanks grow magnitudes larger, the glass so thick it distorts her view into these captured ecosystems, greens slipping away into coral and rock formations and glimmering anemones like fauna from a different planet.
Between swirling sand tiger sharks, she sees him.
Dark hair, broad shoulders, the straight nose—it is unmistakably Jinu. But she is as certain of his presence as she was of the other ghosts she'd chased down in convenience stores and conference rooms.
Rumi blinks hard. A shark slithers past her, light reflecting off its sandpapery hide as its gills flex.
Jinu stares at her.
She draws closer, coming nose-to-nose with the glass. A child bawls to her left, some dessert dropped onto the floor. His mother carries him away. Jinu is dressed simply in a white t-shirt and denim jeans, holding an aquarium pamphlet. No hat, no glasses, no facemask. The missing boy from the wanted posters. No one snaps photos. She's still not entirely certain he isn't a ghost. The cool blue light renders him unearthly, and she squints very hard to make out the tell-tale demon stripes that demarcate his kind.
She steps to the right, and he follows her, all the way down the line until they meet at the curved edge of the aquarium.
Either her mind had finally collapsed in on herself, the Honmoon had shattered, or—
"Are you real?" Rumi blurts.
Jinu smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkling. "That depends."
"Depends on what?"
"Your definition of reality."
This anger is familiar, the same agitation that radiated any of their interactions, but it doesn't suffuse her.
"Give me your hand," she demands.
He raises his hand palm-upwards, a familiar woven bracelet dangling from his wrist.
She slides her fingers into his palm. Warm. Soft. When she'd touched him before, he'd been ice-cold, like a corpse.
He feels—normal. Human.
Real.
In surprise, she lets go. Jinu doesn't react, only relaxing his arm back down to his side.
"Have you seen the jellyfish?" he finally asks.
She shakes her head, and follows him through the darkened halls.
"How are you here? How is any of this—? Why are you at the aquarium?" Rumi finds herself demanding.
"I followed you here, naturally," Jinu says. His smile is coy and feline; his incisors were still elongated, but in a fashionable way, not the way that made her heart thrill that he might actually drink her blood.
"Okay, but you're dead," she says.
"Am I?" They come to a halt in front of a darkened tank. Hundreds of moon jellyfish float in the waters, electric blues and purples shimmering. Jinu raises his hand again. She takes it in hers, pressing two fingers against his pulse; blood pulses beneath her touch. "I don't feel very dead."
"But your soul," Rumi stammers out, "I—I felt it—"
"I don't know why I'm here," Jinu admits, "or why any of us are. I just woke up on a park bench a few days ago hungry as an ox. No voices. No stripes. But I knew where you were—I could pin you on a map, I was so certain of it."
"Oh, great," Rumi mutters, flushing despite herself.
"I can leave—"
"Don't leave," she whispers. She hadn't let go of his hand, his pulse still thrumming with life beneath her touch. She clasps his hand in both of hers, clinging to his solidity, the proof of his existence. "I thought you were dead. It's been weeks.”
“You can keep asking, but I know as much as you do,” Jinu smiles. He gently flicks the edge of her baseball cap. She scowls up at him. She was only wearing simple tennis shoes, and she felt very small beside him. His eyes glaze; she keeps expecting that shift of gold, but it never comes. He drags his thumb over her cheekbone, and she has to try very hard not to consciously lean into his touch. “They’re beautiful,” he murmurs. “And you’re not hiding them anymore.”
She swallows, letting her eyes fall closed in the cool darkness. But Jinu drops his hand, and he says, “Come on. There’s still so much I haven’t seen.”
She’s been to this aquarium a half-dozen times with Huntrix, but she’s only beginning to realize how limited Jinu’s understanding of the modern world was. “You know about like, the internet and stuff, right?”
Jinu scoffs. “I might be old, but it’s not like I’ve been in a fridge this whole time.” He devours the sight of an underwater riverbed, sunlight dappling over its surface, fish darting like flashes of silver through the waters. “I didn’t have much time to look at beautiful things.”
He stares at her the same way, and it burns her straight through.
“And what about you?” Jinu asks as they pass through one of the tunnels. Families surge past them like schools of fish; their hands keep bumping into one another, and Rumi can’t seem to help herself but to hold his, as if to anchor him here in this moment. “Working on your comeback album?”
She can’t help but glare up at him. I’ve been looking for you everywhere. And she finally seizes upon, “your tiger is sleeping in my room.”
Jinu’s eyes grow wide. “He lived?”
“And the crow. I kept asking them where you were.”
They come to the largest of the exhibits, an enormous tank so large it was as if they’d captured a small piece of an ocean. A giant whale shark circles above, thousands of fish and sea creatures teeming in the waters, uninterrupted.
“I think you’ve captured all of us,” Jinu tells her. The darkness makes this moment timeless. It could be the afternoon. It could be midnight. But there are no interlopers to look on as Jinu slides her baseball cap off her head, exposing her to the saltwater creatures. He tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear, following her braid all the way down to where it lay against her chest.
“I really wanted to see your hair down,” Jinu whispers. “When I realized this was it—that was all I could think of. And your stripes. I got one of those things, at least.”
Rumi had never let a man get this close to her. It went against everything Celine had ever taught her. But she’d loved a demon, and was half-demon besides. “I’ll show you,” Rumi promises.
Maybe she’d been spoiled on dramas, but she’d always assumed her first kiss would be an explosive affair. That her heart would explode right out of her chest. That there would be electricity on his lips.
It is calm, cool, and quiet as Jinu finally kisses her. His lips are dry and warm against hers, his breath a gentle caress against her cheek as he exhales against her mouth. Their noses bump against one another as he draws back, his pupils so wide she could scarcely tell where they ended and his irises began.
“That, too,” Jinu whispers. His exhale is sweet against her mouth. “I never thought I would get to do that.”
As it turned out, there was nowhere else for them to go.
Rumi would sooner rob a bank than try to sneak Jinu into the Huntrix penthouse suites under the noses of her manager, a dozen security guards, assistants, and Huntrix themselves. She could track their location from Zoey's social media posts as they wound their way through department stores and restaurants, and from Zoey's tagged photos of pictures with fans and autographs left in her and Mira's wake like falling leaves. She didn't want to explain Jinu's resurrection--not yet. It felt too perfect a secret to share with the world. Not that she even knew how to explain it. And becoming romantically entwined with another idol would set its own swarm of circling sharks in motion.
Jinu was crashing at a recording studio with the other Saja Boys; they too had woken scattered across Seoul. It seemed the Pride would have their lions still yet. "It's fun, anyway," Jinu tells her on the train. It seems so mundane a place of him, a little too tall for the seat, his knees akimbo as he strokes the back of her hand with his thumb. "I can see why you're in this line of work. The adoration of your fans... it's an addicting thing indeed, even without their souls."
They find themselves instead at the perennial boundary between amorous worlds: a love hotel.
"We don't have to do anything at all," Jinu insists, opening a drawer and putting away the boxes of condoms and other products left out for their perusal. It makes her cheeks heat to even look them. The room is sparkling clean and thankfully not themed, the bed huge and inviting. Rumi sits on it awkwardly until Jinu slips into the bathroom and the hiss of the shower turns on.
He said they didn't have to do anything, so why was she thinking about him in there? Thinking about bare muscled skin, those silvery demon scars, hot water and steam and his mouth—
She stomps over to the air conditioning unit and throttles it as far down as it will go. She didn't want to do anything with him. She wanted to do everything with him. He knew secrets about her that not even her closest friends knew--in so many ways, sharing their bodies felt like nothing at all.
It's something else entirely to see him step out of the shower, skin flushed, water droplets sliding down his neck and into the collar of his supplied pajamas.
"There's still clean towels," he supplies, taking a sip from a bottle of water.
She finds a comb from the side board and untwists the elastic from the end of her hair, pulling the plait over her shoulder as she begins to unwind it.
"Let me," Jinu whispers in her ear. Rumi very nearly jumps out of her own skin, the nearness of him, their secluded hotel, the scandalous reality of the situation sinking in all at once.
"I told you," he smirks, "all I want to do is see you with your hair down."
"You haven't seen all my scars," she finds herself saying.
She very nearly swears his eyes do flash gold at that. "We have all the time in the world," Jinu purrs. "I will settle for this."
He bids her to sit at the edge of the bed, settling himself behind her so her shoulders brushed against his knees. She thought about turning on the television, but it would shatter the illusion of timelessness still preserved by the closed curtains, her phone turned off and tucked away in her purse. Like the aquarium, she could pretend that time was standing still, at least for the eight hours they had this room.
Jinu drags the comb through her plait, unfurling the braid through his fingers. The thick hair whispers through his fingers, the only other sound save for her soft breathing. He picks out hair pins and gently sets them on the bedside table. She wonders if he's done this before, with another woman, a lifetime ago, and banishes the thought from her mind.
It was a second life for both of them. Everything was new.
He drags the comb all the way from her scalp down her nape, gently easing out small tangles with a practiced hand. Her hair pools like an oil spill between them as he brushes it to lay in a shimmering, gossamer river. "Have you ever cut it?" he finally asks.
She shakes her head. "My mother," she finds herself saying. "Celine said she loved my hair. So I kept it long for her." And because they have always played fair, "have you ever done this before?"
Jinu shakes his head. "Never," he murmurs. "Not like this."
It is unimaginably pleasant, the teeth of the comb caressing her scalp, his blunt nails cool and gentle across the nape of her neck. It puts her in mind of her childhood, Celine braiding her hair before practice. She braids and combs her hair every day, but for someone else to unwind her feels more intimate than any undressing. She leans her head back until she meets Jinu's eyes, liquiddark and molten above hers.
Her hair spills over his knee as she turns in the comfortable cage of him, rising to her knees. There's a flush on Jinu's pale cheeks, both of them surprised by her sudden temerity.
She rises, climbing onto the bed, straddling Jinu's narrow hips. He trembles very slightly, awestruck.
"Will you see them?" Rumi whispers. "All of them?"
"I would be a fool to say otherwise," Jinu rasps, his voice very dark.
Rumi pulls off her t-shirt, letting it fall to the floor before unclasping her bralette. Jinu raises trembling hands to her belly, his thumbs whispering over the silvery tracework. He follows a stripe all the way across her ribs, and she shudders horribly as his touch rises higher still between her breasts, lightly tracing the curve of one slight swell. Her nipples pebble at the suggestion of touch, the chill of the air conditioning. With his other hand, he pushes her skirt past her thighs. Through the thin layer of cotton between them, she can feel a growing hardness pressing against her core. On complete instinct, Rumi rocks against it.
Jinu hisses through his teeth, jaw flexing, and there she sees a flash of the demon within, that fire she'd felt when she'd had him pinned against a wall with her blade shimmering at the tendons of his neck, ready to slice. This, too, is its own form of combat. Give and take. Push and pull. His hand rises higher on the taut muscle of her thigh. He looked shaken by her nakedness. She'd thought it would terrify her, to be so exposed in front of anyone like this. But she feels as calm as a stone against the pushing current of the seas.
Rumi bends down, her hair forming a shimmering violet curtain hiding the world away, and slants her mouth over his.
It is a different animal entirely from the chaste kiss in the hallowed light of the aquarium. Here is the fire, the brimstone, the darkness and the undercurrent she had feared and yearned for. She wants too much all at once, and their teeth clack together in her haste to get closer to him. Jinu drags both his arms down her back, crushing him down into her as she collapses like an ocean wave against the shore, melting together into one.
He groans into her mouth, and the sound of it judders all the way down in her spine in a frisson of electrical current. His tongue drags across her lip, and she opens eagerly for him, dragging her fingers through his thick mop of hair, delighted to finally have him precisely where she wanted him, her incubus captured at last.
The world revolves; Jinu pants above her, pinning her wrists above her head. She'd been too dazed to notice him shift. His weight settles comfortably over her. Her hair spills over her breasts, and Jinu reaches down to drag his fingers through the silk.
"There's something," Jinu breathes, "I want to do for you. If you're willing."
Rumi's lashes flutter. She feels like weightless moonshine. She nods, unbearably curious.
When she'd thought of sex before Jinu, she'd always worried over the pain, over the discomfort, over a guy being bad in bed; and that was nothing to say of the vulnerability.
Jinu prowls down the bed, taking hold of her legs and gently tugging her down the mattress. She goes bonelessly until he is kneeling at the foot of the bed, beside the forgotten comb. His impossibly warm hands slide over her taut calves, her bent knees, following the rainbow river of stripes all the way up her thighs with his mouth.
When he comes to the innermost portion of her thighs, Rumi fears she might actually implode. She rakes trembling fingers through his hair, mussing it into a terrible mess, unable to help herself. "Do you trust me?" Jinu whispers.
Rumi nods, reflexively clenching her thighs together, unbearably wet against her panties.
Jinu bites her thigh, sucking the soft skin and laving a dark bruise into the skin. His breath is hot against the thin cotton, and his nose drags along her underwear, pressing a gentle kiss over her clit through the fabric. Her hips jolt upwards, and Rumi gasps with the shock of pleasure before he noses aside the soaked fabric and drags his tongue against her cunt.
She'd never thought it could feel like this; liquid and slippery and seamless. She can do little else but spasm and whimper and gasp against him, every flicker of his tongue seeming to undo her all at once. He seemed to be--testing. Experimenting. Seeing what made her squeal and whimper and dig her nails into his scalp. Like this was all new for him, too. When his tongue circles her clit, her hips begin to rhythmically rock against him, instinctive and desperate. Moving to a beat more ancient than demons and songs, something her body knew intrinsically even if her mind did not.
She doesn't know what she's building towards, that tight coiling low inside her belly, until it seems to explode all at once in a choked gasp, her thighs clenching tight around his ears, locking her ankles behind his head as she sobs desperately. He hums in satisfaction, eyes closed like a satisfied cat as he laps at her climax.
When she kisses him, Jinu tastes like the ocean itself.
Time becomes a mechanism of force again for each remaining hour. Sleep is an impossibility. They talk of everything and nothing. Rumi shows him a bit of choreography from her newest routine and watches, maddened as Juni performs the footwork better than even Mira could. He begs her to let him bathe her and spends thirty minutes washing and combing out her hair until she nigh dozes in the tub. They turn on the television and Rumi watches Jinu laugh at commercials and stare incredulously at the variety shows. It feels like counting down until her world was over again, until this impossibility of a dream finally explodes like a soap bubble and he would once and for all be gone again. They kiss and dress each other and kiss again and walk in a magnetized haze to the clerk to return their roomkeys.
At the train station, Jinu casts a quick glance around the platform before swiping her baseball cap off her head ("Hey!") and hiding them from the world one last time as he kisses her goodbye.
"When will I see you again?" she finds herself begging.
As it turned out, the next morning.
It was nothing short of humorless in hindsight, that she'd thought herself so clever as to hide a love affair from the entire world. HUNTR/X was one of the biggest girl groups of their generation. Bleary-eyed in the early dawn, Rumi stumbles off the elevator to Zoey and Mira glaring at her.
"Don't bother lying," Mira cuts in. She holds up her phone. "This just went live thirty minutes ago."
"We've been trying to reach you!" Zoey cries. "We thought you were dead or worse!"
Rumi grabs the phone from Mira, scrolling through now hundreds of articles and photos—
Of her and Jinu. At the aquarium. On the street. On the train. Even their concealed kiss on the train station.
"Bobby's having a full on meltdown," Mira deadpans. "This is like, a PR nightmare from hell. Hey!" she snaps her fingers in front of Rumi's face. "What is your deal?"
Rumi couldn't help but explode into a fit of laughter. "He's real," she gasps. "He was really there. It wasn't a dream. He's real. He's alive."
"You're going to wish you were both dead after this!" Mira retorts, but even she cannot summon enough venom to smother the first real smile they'd seen on Rumi in weeks.