Onyx: Love

by J. S. Lee

  “One of the media outlets in New York have asked for some shots for an article. Can you send me some options to send to them? You can have a watermark on them.”

  I nodded my agreement. The terms of my contract stated that the photographs belonged to Atlantis. I’d been adding the Atlantis logo to them as I was going, so although I wasn’t going to receive any monetary compensation for them, it was nice to be able to leave my personal mark on them. “I’ll go get on that,” I told him.

  “Much as I agree it’s too much information, there’s nothing I don’t want to hear, especially when it affects Onyx.” He let out a long and weary sigh. “And now I have to have a conversation with JongB about boundaries.”

  “Do you want me to?” I offered.

  Sungmin considered it, but then shook his head. “You do your job; I’ll do mine.” He disappeared back into the kitchen.

  I decided that the best thing I could do was return to my room and get my head down for the next couple of hours. Sat in front of my laptop, looking at the photographs and then the time, I quickly concluded I could get all the images done if I didn’t get to the venue until midafternoon – a couple of hours later than I’d agreed with Sungmin. I quickly sent him a message, not wanting to go downstairs and disturb him, suggesting I stay here until then.

  It took a while before he replied his agreement. Shortly afterwards, I heard the bustle from the hallway as they all left the house. I cranked up my music and lost myself in my work.

  제 5 장

  Bad

  The venue was a place called Troxy. My uber dropped me off outside and I was surprised to see so many people in line already – because it was pouring with rain. Not only that, it was bitterly cold, and the wind was sending the rain sideways. There seemed to be two lines stretching around both sides of the venue too. No sooner had I stepped out of the car, half a dozen girls came running over to me (thankfully with umbrellas).

  “You’re the girl!”

  “It’s you!”

  “You’re so lucky!”

  “How does he smell?”

  “I…” I gave the last girl a puzzled look. “How does who smell?”

  “CX!” she squealed, brandishing her phone at me. “I took this last night.”

  It was a picture of CX asleep on my shoulder. I could feel the blood drain from my head, but I fought to keep my expression neutral. “I’m Onyx’s photographer,” I told them. “I had to go into London for a new laptop and CX volunteered to come with me. We’ve only just arrived from New York, so we were a little jet-lagged.”

  “I told you so!” the first girl squealed excitedly. “You’re the one who fell asleep on the plane with him.”

  I knew what she was talking about: we’d missed a flight, caught the next one, and CX had indeed fallen asleep on me then. “If the least I can do is offer CX my shoulder to sleep on, I’ll do it,” I told them, trying to be vague. Admittedly, the photo on the plane had been taken when we hadn’t been seeing each other, but they wouldn’t know the difference.

  “You’re the luckiest girl in the world!”

  “Onyx are a dream to work with,” I agreed. “And I get to travel around the world with them.” I sucked in a deep breath. “You haven’t shared that, have you?” I asked the owner of the phone.

  “I’ve just put it on Instagram,” she told me. “I was trying to come up with the perfect hashtags. It’s already gotten thirty likes! Why?”

  I refrained from swearing. “It’s not that we have anything to hide there: that’s perfectly innocent. It’s just, you know what some fans are like. They’ll see that and automatically assume he’s dating, and then this will spiral into something that could hurt CX.”

  “You want her to delete it?” one of the girls asked in disbelief.

  “No.” That wasn’t a lie. The damage was already done.

  “But she has a point,” another girl pointed out.

  “I’ll delete it,” the first girl said, glumly.

  I gave her a small smile. “How about you just crop me out of it?”

  “Oh!” Her eyes lit up as she switched to Instagram and pulled the photograph up. A giant black squiggle was covering my face. “You’re not in it.”

  I had to laugh at the relief of that. “Thank you,” I told her, sincerely before I headed to the door. When I was eventually let in, I went straight to the green room to let Sungmin know what was happening. Only I walked into another room of tension.

  Once more, it was radiating from Jiwon.

  Everyone was sitting in silence. All were already in their first outfits. Half had their makeup done. JongB was one of them. I marched up to him and narrowed my eyes at him. “Follow me.” I didn’t even wait to make sure he was following me as I left the room. Outside, I waited in the hallway. As soon as he closed the door behind him, I folded my arms. “You know he has every right to be pissed at you, right?”

  “Oh, not you too,” he moaned.

  “That implies everyone else has told you it was a dick move,” I snapped at him. “And it was. Jiwon has told you before that he doesn’t like you watching.”

  “He’s never punched me before!” JongB cried, pointing at his shoulder like I should be seeing a missing arm. “That was a dick move!”

  “I am the last person who is going to condone violence, JongB, and yes, it was a dick move on his part too, but it doesn’t make what you did right.”

  “He doesn’t normally punch me like this!” he said, the words turning more into a whine: he knew I was right.

  “You constantly wind Jiwon up, and yes, he lets you. His reactions are sometimes a little over the top, but they’re never angry. This was anger: you upset him. He has told you very specifically he doesn’t want to be watched. We all agreed we wouldn’t do it with him. And you chose to do it when we were clearly doing something a lot more intimate than just kissing.” My hands fell to my hips. “Honestly, I’m pissed at you too.”

  “I thought you didn’t mind me watching.” He was sulking now.

  I just fixed him an unimpressed look.

  Finally, JongB let out a long breath. “You’re right,” he admitted, almost begrudgingly. “What do I do to make it right?”

  “Start by apologizing?” I suggested. I ran a hand through my damp hair. “And respect boundaries. Jiwon has said no. Even I know him well enough to know that’s not going to change. He wants to keep things private. He has been explicit about that. So if you know he’s with me, and you really need to speak to one of us, knock.”

  “I did!” he objected.

  “Louder!” I added with a tilt of my head. “Announce yourself. Fuck me, JongB! You’re not an idiot, so why are you acting like one?”

  JongB’s gaze dropped to the ground in front of his feet. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I guess I just wanted to see how far I could push him.”

  “Well now you know.”

  “Are you really mad at me?” he asked, flicking his gaze to meet mine.

  I slowly shook my head. “No, but I am disappointed.”

  JongB looked briefly crestfallen, but I could see the sudden appearance of resolve in his eyes as he straightened his back. He turned on the spot and marched back into the room. I hurried after him, watching as he walked straight up to Jiwon. “I’m sorry, hyung,” he said, clearly. “I crossed a line earlier. That was unacceptable. I’m sorry I hurt you. I really won’t let it happen again.”

  “It was unacceptable,” he agreed, gruffly. He opened his mouth to say something else, but stopped, realizing that almost everyone else in the room was watching too. “You’re not getting another chance after that, Jongsub. You crossed the line despite me telling you, twice.”

  “It won’t happen again,” JongB repeated.

  Then, before I could figure out what was happening, JongB sat down on the chair Jiwon was patting beside him, swiveled in it, and lay back against Jiwon – who wrapped his arms around him!

  “What the actual fuck?” I muttered under my bre
ath. Barely a heartbeat ago, Jiwon had been ready to murder him.

  “They love each other really,” Xiao murmured in my ear. I spun on the spot. I hadn’t noticed him leave the mirror he’d been sat in front of while he’d had his makeup done. “You’ve been around us long enough to know we fight and squabble all the time.”

  “If JongB wasn’t such a fast, little shit, Jiwon would have castrated him this morning,” I said, still amazed. “And now Jiwon is cuddling him like a teddy bear.”

  “Jiwon is pretty tightly wound, with a short fuse, and he likes to get his own way. That’s his way of saying he loves you without actually saying those words.” He tilted his head at me, frowning slightly. “Or hadn’t you worked that out yet?”

  No. I hadn’t.

  Not all of it, anyway. The first bit, yes. Youngbin had a temper to rival Jiwon’s, but not the short fuse. As for getting his own way? Hell yes, I had certainly experienced that side of him. I’d also experienced the cuddliness afterwards. I just hadn’t realized that was what Jiwon was trying to tell me then.

  I glanced back at the pair. Although Jiwon had a stern expression, he was absently running his fingers through JongB’s hair.

  Well, damn.

  “It’s not that we spend a lot of time together, it’s that we spend all our time together,” Xiao continued. “We have for years, and we will continue to do so until we enlist. None of us have spent a night without at least one of the others. Even when we hit the point in our contract that we were successful enough to be able to move out of the dorms, we didn’t. We moved to a bigger one, but we all share a room with one other person. We chose to do that, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t times when I want to push Youngbin out of the window.”

  My eyes drifted to Onyx’s leader, busy with his own hair and makeup.

  “The only time we really get to ourselves, away from the others, is when we spend it with you.”

  My attention whipped back to Xiao. “I don’t want to take that away from you.”

  “You misunderstand,” Xiao said with a simple shake of his head. “We want to be with you too. It’s just, for Jiwon, he doesn’t want to spend that moment with anyone else other than you. JongB on the other hand,” he rolled his eyes. “He wants to spend as much time as possible with you, even if it’s not just you and him.”

  There was a knock at the door and a small Asian lady who I didn’t recognize stepped in. It seemed the others knew who she was, as most (excluding those in makeup), gave her a respectful bob of their heads. I stepped back out of the way, stopping the conversation Xiao and I had been having; there had been enough background noise for our chat to have been lost in the room, but this woman’s appearance had made the room fall silent.

  “Is Manager Sungmin in here?” she asked, in Korean. Sungmin stepped forward from the back. Even I hadn’t noticed him in the room. “I wish to speak to you about the questions for the Paper Kiss Challenge,” she told him. “We have, of course, vetted them, but there are a few I thought I should run by you,” she explained as the two walked out of the room.

  I turned back to Xiao, only to find CX and MinMin there. Xiao was heading for his turn with Ina. “What on earth is a Paper Kiss game?” I asked them.

  “You have one pile of paper, and you need to move it to another pile, but you’re only allowed to use your mouth,” CX explained.

  I arched an eyebrow at him. “And people enjoy that?”

  “I do.”

  Beside him, MinMin nodded. “It’s fun and fans like it.”

  “I can’t say that’s the weirdest thing I’ve seen on this tour,” I muttered.

  That meant the woman was the European tour manager. I hurried after them, realizing I need to check with her the planned setup for the fan meet.

  I found her in the main room, barking instructions at girls who barely looked old enough to drink in the UK, never mind the US. They all looked terrified of her. I walked over but the girls had scattered before I got close enough to hear what was being said. She turned and looked at me with a glower. “You missed the briefing. You can leave. Being a volunteer is a privilege, not a right.” Her accent told me she was British Korean and brought up in this country.

  “I’m not a volunteer,” I told her before she could walk off. “I’m the tour photographer and I need to check what your plans are for the group photographs.”

  She turned back, eyeing me suspiciously until her gaze found my AAA pass stuck on my jeans. “Photographs will be after the event. We will clear out all the general admission.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to take the photographs before, while their makeup and hair still looks good?”

  “Looks good?” she scoffed. “Some of them camped out from last night in the pouring rain. They all look shit. And who cares? It’s not like having perfect eyeliner is going to get them in bed with any of the group.”

  I stared at her retreating back in disbelief, unable to formulate a response which was politer than fuck off.

  I had been talking about Onyx. However… no matter how crappy the weather, and even if I’d have camped out overnight, I sure as hell would have made sure my makeup was on point before meeting them. Every girl, and guy, for that matter, probably would be doing the same if they knew they were about to meet their idols.

  Fuck that tour manager. I already didn’t like her.

  I moved down to the stage and checked the lighting, performing my pre-show checks. Once happy, I glanced at my phone to check the time. There was only about ten minutes before the doors were opening. There was little point in heading back to the green room. Instead, I used the bathroom then waited patiently.

  Time ticked away. The only people that seemed to be appearing were staff. Most looked like venue staff, judging by their clothing. The rest were the volunteers, and the more time passed, the more stressed and upset they seemed.

  I gave my phone another look. It was already thirty minutes past when the VIPs were supposed to be allowed access.

  That didn’t feel right. We’d walked off planes and gone straight to the venue. There had been clothing emergencies which had almost delayed us. There had even been members unable to perform, but not once had it ever delayed the start time.

  There had been nothing to indicate anything was wrong when I’d been backstage earlier. Only, I did know them, and there was no way they wouldn’t all go out on stage, even if the disagreement had completely escalated.

  Of course, if something was wrong, the last thing they’d need was me getting in the way. One of them would have messaged me to tell me what the problem was… right? Just in case there was an emergency, I didn’t want to head back there and get in the way.

  I gave it another half hour before I opened the messenger app and started typing. No sooner had I done that, then the doors opened, and fans started filing in. I slid my phone back into my pocket and moved out of the way. Whatever it was, I was sure I would find out later.

  This was the first venue where there weren’t any seats on this floor. The seating was on the balcony above, and as soon as the floor area started filling up, I knew it was going to go crazy.

  It was around then that I first noticed the girl. She had a picture of Jiwon on her t-shirt which had the caption of “THE FUTURE MRS YOON” on it. The shirt wasn’t the thing that caught my attention. There had been plenty of homemade clothing at every stop so far. It wasn’t even the DSLR camera (I was certain she wasn’t running a fan site. There were several of those who had been to every stop so far and I could pick them out now).

  What caught my attention was her attitude. She was stood with her arms crossed, not talking to anyone, scowling at the stage. Every time someone beside her got too close, threatening the fact she was front row and center, right up against the barrier, she would turn and yell at them.

  A bad feeling started to churn up my stomach.

  Yet, when that bad feeling came into fruition, it wasn’t just because of her.

  제 6 장

&nb
sp; Hot Game

  The lights dimmed. The crowd screamed so loudly with their excitement, I wished I’d brought ear plugs. I had to hand it to the London crowd – they were the loudest we’d encountered.

  The stage burst into light and Onyx kicked off with their first song. I could almost feel their energy as they danced, feeding off the screams and cheers. It was intense.

  The guys, damn them to hell, were all also upping the sexiness level on their dancing. I had no idea what had happened over the Atlantic, but they might as well have been having sex on the stage, what with all the body rolls and thrusting. They had always been there, but the way they were performed by all of them… even sweet and innocent CX (Ha! My ass!) and MinMin seemed set on giving the audience orgasms.

  I know for sure I was getting turned on.

  And it was an annoyingly inconvenient place for me to do anything about it.

  I lowered my camera a fraction, ready to move positions, when I caught Xiao’s eyes. And damnit. He knew.

  Onyx went straight into their second number. I darted around, trying to get the best shots. I was just about to get a truly spectacular photograph of CX with his head back as he belted out a note, giving me the most beautiful view of his profile, when someone shoved me.

  I stumbled forward, only just catching myself before I slammed face first into the stage. My hand shot out to steady myself, crunching painfully against the wood. It was the same hand I’d hurt back in L.A. Although I hadn’t seriously injured it back then, the angle and the jar had me yelping in pain.

  I whirled around, ready to punch someone, but stopped myself at the last moment. Not because of who had shoved me, but because I was the photographer and that wasn’t acceptable behavior.

  My glower landed on the bitch-faced woman with the camera. “You were in my way,” she grunted, pointing to her camera. She had an accent I couldn’t place. German, maybe? She wasn’t American, and she wasn’t British.