Chapter 6: The Dorm Confession
[POV: Paan]
The hallway lights were on motion sensors, and Paan stood in the dark outside her own door for a full ten seconds, willing her face into something neutral. It was useless. She could still feel him on her skin, in the ache between her thighs, in the bite marks she kept touching with her tongue. She pushed the door open quietly.
Rima was sitting cross-legged on her bed with her laptop open, fairy lights strung across the ceiling throwing warm little coins of light over the clutter. She looked up. Paan made it four steps in before Rima's eyes narrowed.
"No," Rima said. "No way."
"I'm tired. Goodnight."
"Your hair." Rima pointed with a pen. "Your hair is destroyed. You braided it this morning. I watched you do it. Those braids look like somebody had both fists in them."
Paan dropped her bag by her desk and sat down like nothing was happening. "It's windy outside."
"It is not windy outside. It is dead calm. I checked the weather because Junmin was being annoying about his run." Rima shut the laptop with a soft click. She reached under her bed and came out with the soju bottle, the cheap green one, and two of the small glasses they kept hidden behind the textbook neither of them ever opened. "Sit properly and drink. You're going to tell me everything or I'm going to start guessing out loud, and my guesses are going to be loud and specific."
Paan took the glass. Her hand was steady. That surprised her.
Rima poured, watchful. "So. Studio C. Or wherever you actually were, because you said you were working on the track and it is past midnight and you smell like a man's cologne that you don't own."
"His soap," Paan said, and immediately regretted it.
Rima made a sound like a kettle starting to boil. "His soap. Okay. Okay okay okay." She knocked back her shot and refilled it in one motion. "Whose soap, Paan. Use a name."
Paan turned the little glass on its side on her knee, watching it roll. The fairy lights made the soju look green-gold. She thought about lying, thought about how exhausting it would be, and drank instead. The burn went down clean.
"Seita."
Rima didn't scream, which was worse. She went very still, the way she did right before she hit a stage. Then she set the bottle down on the floor with deliberate care.
"Start from the beginning. The drone thing."
"You know about the drone thing."
"I know you came back from Studio B two weeks ago looking like you'd been shown a magic trick. I don't know the middle. I don't know how the middle turned into soap."
So Paan told it. Not all of it, not yet, but the shape of it. The scream he'd asked for and the note hiding inside it. The hours that dissolved. The track built on her voice. The stairwell, and she watched Rima's jaw go tight at Ahyeon's name, and the second confrontation in the studio while Seita was gone. She stopped there, glass empty, and Rima refilled it without being asked.
"And then?" Rima said.
"Then he came back and reassured me, and we finished the track." Paan heard her own voice go low and even, and knew Rima heard it too.
"Finished it how?"
"Rima."
"Finished it HOW, bitch."
Paan laughed before she could stop herself, and it came out wrecked and bright. She pressed the cold heel of the glass against her cheek. "Against the speaker wall first. And then the bench. By the mirror."
Rima's mouth opened. Closed. She picked up her own glass, downed it, and pointed at Paan with it. "He went down on you against a speaker. While the bass was on."
"The bass was on."
"That's the hottest thing I've ever heard and I hate that Junmin has to be alive at the same time as this information exists." She refilled both glasses, her hands finally moving fast and normal again. "Okay. Details are coming, don't think I'm done. But first." She set the glass down. Her voice shifted, dropped the teasing out of it entirely. "How much of him do you have? Like, is this a thing, or is this a night?"
"He said don't leave. I said never." Paan met her eyes. "That's a thing."
"When?"
"Tonight. After."
Rima exhaled slowly through her nose. She looked down at the bottle label like it needed reading. Then she looked up, and something in her face had gone hard and careful, the bad-girl aura coming out not for a stage but for a conversation.
"Then you need to hear something before you walk into rehearsal tomorrow looking like the sun," she said. "Because Keeho texted the group chat at like nine, and I sat on it because you weren't home yet, and now you are, so."
Paan's stomach tightened. "Keeho tea?"
"Fresh Keeho tea. He got it from one of the second-years who does lighting for the showcases." Rima picked her glass back up, then put it down again without drinking. "Ahyeon has been telling people Seita is hers. Not in a creepy way, in a smart way. Casual. 'We've been working together so much, he's basically promised to me for the showcase duet.' She's said it to at least four people Paan, and two of them believed it, and one of them congratulated her."
The fairy lights hummed. Paan realized she hadn't blinked.
"That's not," she started, and stopped, because she didn't know how to finish it. Not a lie, exactly. Not true, either. Just a story, told often enough to set.
"He doesn't know," Rima said. It wasn't a question.
"He's never once looked at her like anything. He thinks she's friendly."
"Of course he does. She aims the friendly at him like a spotlight." Rima leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "Here's the part that matters. She's not doing it because she's delusional. She's doing it because if the campus already thinks they're a pair, then whatever you are to him looks like a mess on your side. You'd be the girl who got in the middle. That's the play. She doesn't have to beat you in a studio, she just has to make you look like the villain in a story nobody checks."
Paan sat with it. The bite marks on her lip throbbed when she pressed her tongue there. She thought of Seita's hand on the door, locking it, the word mine, and how none of that existed anywhere except that room.
"Does Keeho know about us?" she asked.
"Nobody knows about you. That's the only card you're still holding." Rima picked up the bottle and topped off both glasses, slower this time. "So the question is what you do with it. Because tomorrow she's going to smile at him in front of everyone, and he's going to smile back like a normal person, and you're going to be standing there knowing exactly what she told the whole building while he knows nothing."
Paan drank. The soju didn't burn this time. Outside, somewhere down the hall, a door slammed and someone laughed, the ordinary night going on.
"Then he finds out tonight," she said, reaching for her phone.
Rima's hand shot out and closed around her wrist. "Wait. Wait wait wait. What are you going to say?"
"The truth."
"The truth is a bomb, Paan. You don't text a bomb into a group chat with Junmin in it. That man cannot keep a straight face, let alone a secret." Rima shifted off her bed and onto the floor beside her, knees bumping, both of them hunched over the glowing screen like conspirators. "Show me what you're typing."
Paan typed. Rima read it out loud in a flat voice.
"'Seita and I have been together since tonight. Just so everyone hears it from us.'"
Rima winced like she'd tasted something sour. "Okay, problems. One, 'since tonight' sounds like a one-night thing, which kills you before Ahyeon even opens her mouth. Two, everyone is going to ask how, when, where, and Lily is going to call you. Immediately. She will call you, she will not text, she is incapable."
"So I take out 'since tonight.'"
"Take out 'just so everyone hears it from us' too. That sounds defensive. Like you're pre-arguing with someone." Rima tapped the screen with one lacquered nail. "Shorter. Facts only. Confidence reads as short."
Paan deleted the whole thing and typed again.
'Seita and I are together. Wanted you all to know before you hear some other version.'
Rima hummed. "Better. 'Some other version' is good. It puts the rumor on the defensive without naming her." She paused. "Do you want to name her?"
"If I name her, it's war in the open."
"You're already at war. She just hasn't noticed you brought a weapon." Rima leaned back against the bed frame, the fairy lights catching in her wine-dark hair. "Naming her tells the chat exactly what Keeho already told them. It also tells Seita, in writing, in front of five witnesses, that she's been running her mouth. He can't be oblivious to a screenshot."
Paan stared at the blinking cursor. The soju sat warm and weightless in her chest. She thought about Ahyeon's hand on his arm, the little squeeze, the voice like wind chimes. She thought about congratulating her, some second-year who believed it.
She added a line.
'Also, whoever heard Ahyeon say Seita was promised to her: he wasn't. He never was.'
Her thumb hovered over send. The room was very quiet. Down the hall the laughter had died out, and the radiator ticked in the corner like a slow metronome.
"Last look," Rima said. "You sure? Because the second this leaves your phone, it's not just ours anymore. Keeho will have opinions. Loud ones. Junmin will respond with something unhinged at two in the morning. And Seita finds out his girl goes scorched-earth when she's cornered."
"Good," Paan said. "He should know."
She hit send.
The message sat there for three seconds, a little grey bubble in a dead thread. Then the chat came alive like a dropped circuit board.
Lily first, naturally, and it was a call, the incoming screen flooding half the phone. Paan declined it. Text immediately followed, in caps: WHAT. WHAT DO YOU MEAN TOGETHER. CALL ME BACK RIGHT NOW I AM ALONE IN MY ROOM AND I NEED DETAILS.
Then Keeho: Oh this is DELICIOUS. Bestie you have no idea what you just did. Screenshotting this for the archives.
Then Junmin, at 1:47 AM, predictably: i KNEW IT. i said it weeks ago. rima you owe me. you literally owe me money.
Rima groaned and grabbed her own phone. "I never bet him. He's inventing debts." She typed fast, tongue between her teeth: You never bet me. Stop lying to the chat.
I have witnesses, Junmin replied. My witness is my memory and it is excellent.
Then the chat went still. The typing indicator appeared under Seita's name, vanished, appeared again. Paan's stomach dropped somewhere near the floor. Rima put a hand on her knee without looking away from the screen.
The message came.
'All true. She's mine. And I just heard about what Ahyeon's been saying, so good timing.'
Paan read it twice. Rima read it once over her shoulder and made a low whistle.
"He took the rumors in stride," she said. "Textbook oblivious-to-the-problem, fully-committed-to-you. That's actually kind of perfect."
"You realize," Paan said slowly, "he's going to ask me tomorrow how I found out what she said."
"Keeho's name is written all over it. Keeho will take that hit happily, he lives for attribution." Rima reached for the bottle and topped off both glasses, the green glass catching the fairy lights. "More urgent question. Lily is calling again."
The phone lit up in Paan's hand, buzzing like an angry insect. She answered this time, holding it between her ear and shoulder.
"PAAN." Lily's voice came through at full power, no headphone buffering able to soften it. Rima could hear every word from a foot away. "You declined my first call. I have been sitting here for ninety seconds constructing scenarios. Is it real? It's real, right, because Seita confirmed it, but I need to hear you say it."
"It's real."
"HOW. When. Where. Was it romantic, was it studio-romantic, did it involve equipment, be honest with me about the equipment."
"Lily."
"I'm a vocal major, Paan, I know what speakers are for."
Rima snatched the phone. "It involved a speaker wall and a bench by a mirror, and she bit her own lip so hard she has a mark, and I need you to come here tomorrow with pastries because she is not telling it as well as it deserves."
"RIMA," Lily screamed, delighted. "I'm coming tonight. I'm putting shoes on."
"It's two in the morning."
"Keeho's awake. Everyone's awake. This is an event." There was a rustle, a door sound, and then Lily's voice dropped half its volume and gained a different edge. "One serious thing before I come down. Paan. Sweetheart. Ahyeon congratulated herself in front of me last week. About the duet. I didn't have anything to say back then because I didn't know." A beat. "Tomorrow, when she does her sweet little smile at rehearsal, I'm going to be standing right next to you. So is Keeho. So is Rima, probably, because she's already got her stage face on, I can hear it in the silence."
Rima, indeed, had her stage face on. Chin lifted, eyes flat and bright.
"Fine," Paan said into the phone. "Bring the pastries."
"Bringing the pastries. Wearing the good hoodie. Nobody sleeps." The line died.
Rima set the bottle down and looked at her. "You know what happens now. Word travels by nine. Ahyeon hears her own story died tonight, and she hears who killed it."
"Then she comes at me again, and this time five people are watching." Paan looked at the chat, Seita's message still glowing at the bottom. She typed one back to him alone, off the group thread.
'Come by the studio tomorrow. Before rehearsal.'
His reply was fast, no typing indicator at all.
'Already booked it. Ours, 6 AM.'
Rima read it upside down and grinned, slow and dangerous. "Ours. He said ours. Sweetheart, tomorrow is going to be a bloodbath."