Scandalized(20)

I look up from my phone as Alec’s head turns and he gazes out in disbelief into the distance, scanning the size of the crowd. Our eyes meet. Betrayed, embarrassed tears rush up my throat, burning my eyes, and I break away first—just as his mouth forms the shape of my name—turning and exiting the doors just behind me.



* * *



My frantic rabbit-hole internet searching does nothing to calm me down on the congested drive home. I can’t even reply to Eden’s increasingly hysterical texts, because I’m apparently intent on punishing myself with how big an idiot I am.

For example: I knew he moved from London to Seoul when he was twenty-two, but I didn’t know that he’d been scouted on the street there, hired by a management company, trained in acting, and cast at twenty-five in a romantic comedy about a group of professional skateboarders. His character, the street-smart second male lead, fell in love with the daughter of a chaebol family. (“Do you still skateboard?” I’d asked him in the bar, to which he’d only replied, “Really?” with a flat expression of disbelief that I can now, of course, translate.)

His second role was in a fantasy drama where he played a ghost that can only touch the woman he loves when she dreams about him. To get her to dream about him he—wait for it—plays the piano.

When I read this one, I audibly groan, earning an odd look in the rearview mirror from my Lyft driver.

I now know that when Alec turned twenty-eight he took a break from acting for his compulsory military service. His comeback was in a science-fiction-themed drama that received mixed reviews, but he followed it up with an indie film, A Quiet Devastation, which turned into an unexpected hit throughout Asia and for which he won nearly all of the main pan-Asian drama awards that year. After that, he landed the role as Jeong Jinwon in My Lucky Year, which is apparently the highest-rated Korean drama of all time.

Now he’s in his third season as Dr. Minjoon Song in BBC’s hit series The West Midlands. The Hollywood Reporter conveniently explains that the upcoming season focuses on the stoic Dr. Song’s story arc and his uncharacteristically wild tumble into love with a woman he meets when she crashes into his car during a blizzard.

Sweet Jesus.

He was rumored to be dating his current costar, a French actress who, even if they both deny it and I believe that they really aren’t romantically involved, is so beautiful that I want to punch my own face. Searching for information about the two of them together—a type of personal Google search I never in a million years thought I would do—leads me to a string of gifs of kissing scenes, scenes so hot they make me both turned on and mildly queasy, and are understandably setting the worlds of both K-dramas and BBC fangirls on fire.

In one gif, Alec pulls away from a scorching kiss and rises up on his knees to take his shirt off. In the back seat of the car, I watch it on a loop approximately seventeen thousand times. His abdomen is like a beautifully symmetrical rock garden, for fuck’s sake, and there are so many links to YouTube edits of the scene that I have to put my phone down and cup my hands over my face.

When we pull up in front of my building, Eden is standing outside, shouting at me before I’m even out of the car. I catch a fair bit of what she’s yelling while I pull my bag from the trunk—“How did you not know it was Alexander Fucking Kim? Why did you not text me his name the second you went into his room?”—but with the Alec-induced chaos in my head, and going on only a paltry handful of hours of sleep, I can’t walk and listen to her freaking out at the same time. I really need to go upstairs, climb into my bed, and sleep for a hundred days.

Unfortunately, neither Eden nor my deadlines are going to let me do this. Every time I spoke to my editor, Billy, when I was in London, he grew more and more invested in the Jupiter story. He wants five hundred words but is willing to stretch it to an almost unheard-of fifteen hundred if I can, as he puts it, “break a bottle over my head with this one.”

Eden follows me into my room and sits on my bed. “Start at the beginning.”

I push my suitcase into the corner and decide to ignore it for now. Maybe forever. “E, I have a ton of work to do.”

“Ten minutes,” she says. “I just need ten minutes. I mean, you could have called me in the car to save time.”

“I didn’t want to talk about it in front of the Lyft driver.”

“No,” she counters, seeing straight through me, “you had to google the fuck out of him.”

This is the one person who has known me at my best and worst. She was my college roommate, my postcollege roommate, my post-Spence roommate, and the only person in our circle of friends who never clicked with Spence, who warned me against moving in with him—I don’t trust him, George, she’d said, and I’m not sure how he’ll fuck it up, but I’m worried he will. She’s the one who took my side and suggested the five who sided with Spence in the split “needed cult deprogramming.”

Eden Enger has seen me heartbroken crumpled and rock-concert high and has never judged me for any of it. But right now, she’s about to judge my complete obliviousness. I’m just going to have to absorb what’s coming.

“Fine.” I sit down at the edge of the mattress and fall onto my back. “Get it off your chest.”

“Gigi Ross,” she growls. “How did you not know who you were fucking? Alexander Kim’s shirtless promo still from Quiet Devastation was my computer background for, like, six months.”