Yoongi opened his phone. He clicked on the app he recorded his songs with. No one knew he composed music for the piano. It was his secret passion. But his appa expected him to follow in his footsteps in the company. So Yoongi kept his love of music hidden.
God bless his stepmother. She had paid for him to have piano lessons the year she’d married his appa. It had been eleven months after his birth mother had died. Yoongi had poured all his young grief into that piano. He’d begun composing music way back then. The ebony and ivory keys were the only things that had solaced him that year.
But when he’d entered high school, his appa had caught him playing once and scolded him for leaving his studies to do something as frivolous as playing an instrument. After that, Yoongi had learned how to hide his passion. He’d discovered an old piano at his high school. He’d stayed for hours after school every day to tickle those keys.
His parents had always believed he was a devoted student after that. He didn’t come home until after nine each night. He’d stayed late at school to “study.” They just hadn’t known that the piano was what he’d been studying.
They also didn’t know that he had found an upright piano for cheap after he’d moved into his apartment. He’d convinced them to let him move into the apartment building during his senior year. It was right next to the dorms – but more private because he didn’t have to share a room with anyone.
The first thing he’d bought for his apartment had been that piano. Its owner had let him have it for a song – literally – until he could pay her back. He’d sat down at it and played her one of his sweet melodies. Then three of his basketball buddies had helped him move it to his apartment.
He’d gone without breakfast and dinner for a month to save enough money to pay back the old woman who had loaned it out to him free of charge. But eventually, he’d paid her in full for the instrument. It belonged to him now. And most nights, he sat down at that lovely instrument and let the songs his heart was singing flow through his fingertips.
As he rummaged through Nari’s fridge, he hummed along to his latest song. The tinkling melody filled her small apartment. An hour later, Nari awoke to a wonderful smell and an even more delightful melody. She lay perfectly still in her bed. Listening.
Piano music. But not just any piano music. It was stunning.
She closed her eyes and let her ears take up the space all five of her senses usually occupied. She was being transported to heaven by those beautiful melodies. She lay for minutes on end reveling in those precious notes. Tears were streaming down her face by the time the third song had come to its end. Only then did her sense of smell intrude into that sacred space again.
Beef, onions, garlic, and soy sauce. Someone was cooking. And it smelled wonderful. Her stomach rebelled. Loudly.
Suddenly, a tousled head of hair appeared in the doorway to her bedroom. “Dare I hope that was a hungry stomach just rumbling at me?” Yoongi murmured as he leaned that tousled head against her bedroom door frame. “If it was, I have good news for it. Dinner is served.”
With those words, he headed back to the kitchen. Quickly, she reached up and wiped her tears away. A moment later, he entered her room with a tray laden with two bowls of delicious smelling food, two glasses of water – Alas! She had no wine! – and two pairs of chopsticks.
He carried the tray over to her nightstand and set it down. Then, as she sat up and rested her back against the wall behind her, he handed her a bowl and some chopsticks. He picked up his own and walked around her bed. He plopped down next to her and began to eat his food. Ravenously.
She sat staring at him. Yoongi was in bed with her. She should be really nervous, right? But he was treating it like it was a couch. Her eyes slid down to his bowl and back up again as he shoved meat and glass noodles into his mouth. He caught her studying him and let a crooked smile escape his lips around his big bite of food.
“I hope it’s okay that I used your kitchen and your ingredients to make us dinner. I didn’t want to leave you alone in an unlocked apartment. So I made us dinner while you slept.”
She didn’t even know where to begin. “What is that music?”
Suddenly, his eyes dropped. Was it her imagination, or were his cheeks turning red?
“Here. Try a bite.” He reached over and grabbed some of her noodles and meat with his chopsticks. Then he held the food out to her. “Open your mouth.”
She glanced down at it. Then she opened her mouth and accepted the bite.
Before closing her eyes in pure bliss.
The man was a genius in the kitchen!
She sat chewing. So happy in that moment to be in her apartment with him eating his food. But then she remembered where they actually were. Not just in her apartment. In her bed. Eating his food. And listening to the most divine music. But whose music was it?
“Who is the artist? I don’t recognize it.”
She paused to close her eyes in rapture for a moment. His eyes slid over that blissful expression, and he felt his heart shift violently in his chest.
“You really like it?” he whispered.
“I do. I do! It’s just divine. Who is it?”
That blush crept across his face again.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Yoongi, why are you blushing?”
He hid his glorious eyes in his bowl. And shoved more food into his mouth.
“Yoongi,” she whispered.
His eyes lifted slowly, painstakingly, to meet hers a moment later. “Hmm?”
“Who. Is. The. Artist?”
He cleared his throat. Then he began to choke. For real. He bent towards her and threw his arm out around her to grab a glass of water from her nightstand. He dragged the glass up to his mouth as he collapsed against the wall once more. He took a sip, coughed some more. Sputtered. Drew a deep breath. Took another sip. Closed his eyes and leaned his head back against her wall. And became silent.
She reached over and took the glass out of his hand. She set it on her nightstand. Then she reached for the bowl in his lap. It went to the nightstand next. Then she set her bowl next to it.
She turned her head to gaze at him. He was so beautiful. His face was relaxed now. As though he was sleeping. Yet she knew he was not.
Her hungry eyes slid over the contours of that beautiful face. Traveling over the tiny mounds created by his eyes hiding under his eyelids. Traversing the small mountain that was his nose. Falling into the divot above his upper lip. Slipping across that soft mouth. Yearning to feel it against her own.
Stop that! Enough! He lied to me. He used me.
Her eyes traveled lower until they came to rest on his long, slender fingers spread out on the bedsheet next to her thigh. She would never be able to explain the urge that followed that sighting. Or why she gave in to it.
But the next moment, her hand covered his. Her fingers sought out the spaces in between his own. And curled around his fingers. Then she picked up that hand and brought it to rest in her lap. On top of her other hand. Now his hand was sandwiched between both of hers.
She lifted her palm and examined that elegant hand. Her eyes slid down the length of each lovely bone. The hands of a pianist. She stroked those captivating fingers with her thumb. Then her thought reverberated again. The hands of a pianist. She started.
“It’s you, isn’t it? You’re the artist. The music I’m hearing right now. That angelic music is yours! I’m right, aren’t I?!”
She glanced up into his face.
His eyes opened slowly. When they found hers, she felt them pierce her all the way down to the depths of her soul. She fell into them. They were full of such longing that she felt as if she would never find her way out again. His yearning was sucking her in. Making her crave things too.
Then he blinked, and she discovered she was still sitting on her bed with him. Not drowning in those mahogany eyes. But his fingers tightened around hers. As his eyes probed the depths of her own.
“Yes,” he finally whispered without moving his lips.
How had he done that?
Her face flooded with joy. “You have such a gift, Yoongi! Is that what you’re going to study at university? The piano?”
Suddenly, his hand was gone. Reclaimed by him. Leaving her to drift alone on an aimless sea. His eyes had left her too. They were staring, unseeing, across her room and through her doorway.
“No,” he whispered. “I’m not going to college. And even if I were, the piano is the last thing I’d study.”
“What?” She stared at him as her heart split wide open. She could hear the bitterness in his tone. “But you clearly love it. And Heaven itself has gifted you! Why would you not pursue it? Why aren’t you going to college?” She was truly shocked.
“Because I screwed my life up.” Then he covered his face with his hands and began to sob.
Helpless, she watched him. She wanted to reach out and touch him. But she was scared to. Afraid she’d do something stupid. Like giving in to a hundred impulses that were flowing through her right now.
“Which one should I choose, Nari? Tell me. Of all the girls my appa has paraded in front of me, which one should I pick? Which one will save my appa’s company and bring me the least misery? Is a college education worth selling my soul, do you think? A business degree worth being saddled with a wife I have no affection for?
“I blew it with the only girl I ever loved the first time I took her on a date. All I’m left with now are girls who bore me to death. Like the one I brought back to my apartment so I could clean the wound she received from a door as we left the restaurant on our first date. The most inane hour and a half I’ve ever spent in my entire life!
“And then the girl I loved witnessed me catching that insipid girl as she lost her balance in an elevator. And, of course, that unwitting sweetheart of a girl thought I was flirting with the boring girl. But I wasn’t. I didn’t give one whit about her.
“My heart was across that elevator, rubbing the aching feet of the girl I loved. A girl who has repeatedly pushed me away. A girl who has no faith in me.”
He sighed deeply. “So I am resigned. I have decided that I have no faith in me either. I’m done. I will go to my appa and tell him to sell me to the highest bidder.
“If I can’t have the girl I love, I might as well sacrifice myself for my sister’s sake. Perhaps – perhaps – Eunji will be able to marry the man she loves instead of being used as a pawn in our appa’s business affairs. Perhaps I can redeem myself this way.”
Another sob escaped his lips. He rolled away from her. Lying down on her bed and drawing his knees up to his chest. He began to weep as he let it all go. Every single dream he had cherished. Most of all, his dreams of her. Of Nari.
She didn’t care for him. She was going to make him leave in a moment. He just knew it. So he would lie here in her bed for as long as she’d allow him, so he could memorize the scent of her sheets. And the sound of her soft breath next to him. And in the years to come, he would pretend she was lying next to him. When he was cold and lonely.
