Idol of the Heavenly One - vanish into fiction

Screek.

“What’s going on? Myeong-hyeon, didn’t you say you were rushing to the bathroom?”

I immediately sank back into the sofa and stared at the TV screen, worried I might run into Baek Jae-heon coming out of his room. Joo I-rip, who was sitting next to me, asked if I was in a hurry for the bathroom, as if he had never seen me move so fast before.

“No.”

“Oh, really? Then I’ll play it?”

“Yeah.”

I clicked on a video that had just been uploaded at the top of the company channel, marked “3 minutes ago.”

“Weren’t you asleep?”

“I woke up.”

From Go Hee-min’s words, I realized that Baek Jae-heon had come into the living room. Seriously, he was asleep when the other members’ teasers were playing, so why is he awake and watching mine?

Just thinking about Jae-heon watching with me made me feel way too self-conscious. It was already hard enough to act normal around him since the shoot, like something inside me broke whenever I saw him, but now I had to watch the video of us holding hands together? This was no easy task. But what could I do? I couldn’t exactly tell Baek Jae-heon not to watch.

On screen, there was a lone white house in a place where the forest and fields were all dried up. Inside, the furniture was entirely white as well, as if matching the house itself, and I appeared, dressed in white, slowly walking across the room.

Then I sat on the sofa, blankly staring at a small table clock on the coffee table in front of me. The clock had long stopped working—dust had gathered on it, and even the second hand no longer moved.

I soon lay down on the sofa, turning only my head to keep looking at the clock.

The shot closed in on my face, then quickly alternated between my expression and the unmoving clock. Then, suddenly, tick. The second hand moved forward by one step.

At that moment, I narrowed my eyes and slowly sat up. My brows furrowed, as if still questioning what I had just seen. But soon, the white door in front of me opened, and hope seemed to spread through the scene.

When the door opened, Baek Jae-heon came in, breathing hard as though he had run here. He strode toward me, and the sound of his breathing was amplified in slow motion. Then…

“Let’s go.’”

A hand was extended toward me. I stared blankly at that hand, eyes filled with confusion, before I clasped it as if hypnotized and followed him through the door and the trailer ended.

“Oh~ what was that? What was that?”

“You two should be in a drama or run for office or something.”

“Holy crap…! Myeong-hyeon, Jae-heon, you two were… amazing!”

“What the— Hyung, when did you practice acting?!”

The reactions from the guys were explosive. Well, it made sense. The director somehow managed to put together only the perfect shots of me, without a single frame showing how awkward I really was. I knew there were awkward takes. As expected of a professional.

I smiled awkwardly at the praise, but my eyes immediately went searching for Baek Jae-heon. I wanted to see how he reacted.

But I didn’t need to look for him. He was already watching me from among the group.

“……”

Jae-heon just quietly stared at me, not saying a word. His gaze wasn’t as dark and deep as it had been during filming, but I still couldn’t guess what he was thinking.

But thanks to my past life experience, I could at least make a guess. It felt like… curiosity?

Was he surprised that I had done better than he expected? I wanted to take advantage of the moment and be the first to say something nice to break the tension, but there’s that Arabic proverb that goes—