Chapter 1: Caught in the Glow of Betrayal
The air backstage tasted like stale sweat and cheap energy drinks, a metallic hum hanging underneath the deafening thump of the bass from the arena. Dunk clutched the two laminate passes so hard the edges dug into his palm. He’d pulled a lot of strings to get these, to surprise Joong after the show. A stupid, giddy smile kept tugging at his lips as he navigated the labyrinth of concrete corridors, the graffiti a blur of neon spray paint under the flickering strip lights.
He could just make out Joong’s voice, that particular low timbre he used when he wasn’t performing, around the next bend by the stacked flight cases. Dunk’s step lightened, ready to call out.
Then he saw them.
Pond had Joong pinned against a wall of black equipment cases, one hand fisted in the sequined fabric of Joong’s stage jacket. Their faces were inches apart, Pond’s body caging Joong in. Not a fight. Something else entirely.
Pond’s voice was a ragged, desperate hiss, cutting through the distant roar of the crowd. “He’ll never forgive us.”
Dunk froze. The passes slipped from his fingers, clattering on the concrete. The sound was tiny, but it might as well have been a gunshot.
Two heads snapped toward him.
Time didn’t slow down. It fractured. He saw the sequins on Joong’s collar glitter under a passing light. He saw the panic widening Pond’s eyes, the way his grip went slack. He saw Joong’s mouth, slightly parted, still so close to Pond’s.
“Dunk,” Joong breathed, the name leaving him like a punch.
Dunk’s own smile, the one he’d carried all the way here, felt plastered and dead on his face. He’d been mid-sentence, a happy “Hey, I—” still hanging in the air, unfinished. His brain offered up useless details: a water bottle rolling near his foot, the hum of a generator down the hall, the sticky feel of the laminate on the floor.
“It’s not… wait,” Pond said, finally shoving himself back from Joong, hands coming up like he was surrendering. His movement was clumsy, too fast.
Joong straightened his jacket, a performer’s instinct kicking in, but his eyes were locked on Dunk. “Baby, let me explain.”
The word baby did it. It sliced through the numbness. Dunk took a step back, his heel scraping against the floor. He looked from Joong’s pleading, guilty face to Pond’s—his best friend’s—pale, shattered expression.
“Explain what?” Dunk’s voice didn’t sound like his own. It was flat, hollow. “I just… I got passes.”
He gestured weakly toward the floor, as if the passes explained his presence, as if they made any of this make sense. The silence that followed was thicker than the arena noise, swallowing everything.
Joong took a step forward. “Please. It was a mistake. It was nothing.”
“Looked like something,” Dunk heard himself say. A strange, cold calm was settling over him, locking the scream building in his chest behind a wall of ice.
Pond ran a hand through his hair, his usual easy-going demeanor shattered. “Dunk, man, I’m so sorry. It’s complicated.”
“Complicated.” Dunk repeated the word, tasting its bitterness. His best friend and the person he loved. Tangled in a dark hallway. Pond’s words—He’ll never forgive us—echoed. Not ‘you’.
He’d seen enough. The image was already searing itself onto the back of his eyelids. He didn’t need the details. The why, the how long, the secret glances he’d missed. It would all come later, in a crushing wave. Right now, he just had to move.
“Dunk, don’t go like this,” Joong said, voice cracking with a fear Dunk had never heard before. It sounded like loss.
But Dunk was already turning. The movement felt robotic. He left the passes on the grimy floor. He walked past the rolling water bottle, down the graffiti-tagged corridor, toward the distant sound of twenty thousand cheering fans who adored the man he thought he knew.
His phone buzzed incessantly in his pocket. Once. Twice. A third time. He didn’t pull it out. The noise of the arena swelled as he pushed through a heavy fire door, the blinding lights and screaming crowd hitting him like a physical wall. He disappeared into the sea of moving bodies, just another faceless fan in the dark, leaving the bright, painful world of the stage behind him.
The roar of the crowd was a physical thing, a wall of sound that vibrated in his teeth and shoved against his chest. Dunk let it carry him, a piece of driftwood in a churning, neon-lit river. He bumped against shoulders, mumbled apologies that were lost in the noise, his vision blurred by the strobing lights and something else hot and pressing behind his eyes.
He needed air that didn’t smell like Joong’s cologne and Pond’s stupid, familiar soap.
A fire exit door appeared, a glowing red rectangle in the swirling dark. He hit the bar with his hip, the alarm swallowed by the arena’s din, and stumbled into the cool, stagnant silence of a loading dock. The door sighed shut behind him, muting the concert to a dull, rhythmic thud.
Here, the world was concrete and the sour tang of garbage. A single sodium-vapor light buzzed overhead, casting long, distorted shadows from dumpsters. He braced his hands on his knees, gulping in the damp air.
His phone vibrated again. And again. A persistent, angry insect in his pocket.
He didn’t look. Looking would mean seeing their names. Their words. Their lies.
Instead, he saw it. The exact, crystalline image his mind kept replaying. The strain in Pond’s forearm where he held Joong. The sequined jacket crushed against grimy black plastic. The intimate, terrified whisper. He’ll never forgive us. It wasn’t a question. It was a shared truth.
A dry, heaving sound escaped him. Not a sob. Something emptier.
He straightened up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. The chill of the night was seeping through his thin shirt. He started walking, not toward the taxi rank where fans were clustering, but away from it, down a service road that skirted the venue’s hulking backside. The vibrations in his pocket finally stopped. The silence felt heavier.
A car slowed beside him, an old Toyota with a dented fender. The passenger window rolled down. “Hey. You need a ride? You look lost.”
Dunk kept walking.
“Suit yourself,” the driver muttered, the car accelerating away with a raspy exhaust note.
His feet carried him without direction. He crossed a bridge over a polluted-looking canal, the water reflecting the city’s orange glow. He passed a 24-hour convenience store, its fluorescent light spilling onto the sidewalk like something toxic. He finally stopped, leaning against a bus shelter glass fogged with condensation.
This was where he’d have called Pond. After a bad day, after a weird audition, after anything. Hey, you free? Want to get disgusting noodles and talk shit?
His throat tightened. He pulled out his phone. The screen was a catastrophe of notifications. Missed calls: Joong (7), Pond (3). Messages previewed, fragments of the explosion.
Joong: Please just talk to me. It’s not what you think.
Pond: Dunk. Call me. Please.
Joong: Where are you? I’m leaving the venue. Tell me where you are.
Joong: I love you. Please.
The word ‘love’ felt like a slap. A fresh, sharp pain. Dunk’s thumb hovered, trembling, over the screen. A part of him, the wounded, desperate part, wanted to tap out a reply. To demand answers. To scream.
Another part, the part that had gone cold and quiet back in the hallway, observed it all from a distance. That part noted the phrasing: It’s not what you think. Not a denial. A deflection. That part replayed Pond’s anguish, which seemed less about betrayal and more about being caught.
He didn’t type anything. Instead, he swiped, his movements precise and final. He enabled ‘Do Not Disturb.’ He blocked both numbers.
The action was quiet. Anti-climactic. There was no dramatic throwing of the phone. Just a soft click as the screen went dark, reflecting his own pale, unfamiliar face.
A bus approached, its headlights cutting through the gloom. It wasn’t his route. He didn’t care. He climbed on, paid with crumpled bills from his pocket, and took a seat by a window in the back. As the bus pulled away, he watched the city scroll past—blurs of light and life, people in cafes, couples walking, everything normal and continuing.
He rested his forehead against the cool glass. The shaking started then, deep in his core, a tremor that had been waiting for the solitude to emerge. He wrapped his arms around himself, holding tight.
The bus rumbled into the night. He had no destination. Just away. For now, that was the only plot point that mattered.
The bus deposited him in a part of the city he didn’t know. It was all fluorescent-lit convenience stores and shuttered nail salons, the sidewalks empty. The vibration in his pocket had become a phantom limb, a constant hum of absence. He found a 24-hour diner, the kind with sticky vinyl booths and a smell of old grease and bleach. He slid into a corner seat, his back to the wall.
A waitress with tired eyes and a name tag that read ‘Mona’ brought him coffee without asking. It tasted bitter and thin. He wrapped his hands around the chipped mug, staring at the brown liquid but seeing the dark hallway, the sequins, the panic.
His thumb unlocked the phone of its own volition. The blocked calls list was a scroll of accusation. He opened his photo gallery, a masochist’s slideshow. There was Joong, laughing on his couch, wearing Dunk’s hoodie. There was Pond, arm slung around his shoulders at some awards after-party, making a stupid face. A selfie of all three of them, squeezed into a single frame, cheeks pressed together. He looked happy. He looked blind.
His finger hovered over the delete button. A tremble started in his knuckle.
“Need a warm-up?”
He flinched. Mona stood there with a glass pot of coffee.
“No,” he said, his voice rough from disuse. “Thanks.”
She nodded, her gaze lingering on his face. It wasn’t pity. It was the bland recognition of someone who’d seen a thousand varieties of wreckage at three in the morning. She moved on.
He put the phone face down on the table. The act felt more final than blocking the numbers.
The door jingled. A group of guys in their twenties, loud and buzzing from some event, tumbled into a booth. Their voices cut through the diner’s quiet.
“…totally epic. Joong’s solo was insane tonight.”
Dunk went very still. The mug was suddenly scalding in his hand.
“I know, right? The energy. And when Pond came out for the encore? The crowd lost it.”
They were JASPER fans. Of course they were. The city was papered with posters for the tour. He shrunk into his booth, pulling the hood of his sweater up, a pathetic attempt at invisibility.
“They’ve got such chemistry,” one voice said, a sly, knowing tone threading through the words. “On and off stage, if you know what I mean.”
A laugh. A snort. “Dude, that’s just fanfic talking.”
“Is it? You see the way they look at each other during interviews? There’s something there. More than just bandmates.”
The words were casual, speculative gossip for strangers. To Dunk, they were nails. Each one hammered the image deeper: the look they shared, the secret he was too stupid to see. The public had noticed. The whole world had probably been whispering about it while he smiled for the cameras beside them.
A hot, sour rush flooded his mouth. He stood up too fast, the table leg screeching against the linoleum. He threw a crumpled bill next to his full mug and walked out, head down, past the booth of chattering fans.
The cold air was a relief. He walked faster, breath fogging, turning down side streets until the noise was just traffic and his own frantic heartbeat. He leaned against a brick wall, the rough surface scraping his palms.
He fumbled for his phone again. This time, he opened a private fan forum he’d accidentally discovered months ago and had never dared to visit again. The banner was a glossy, professional shot of Joong and Pond, back-to-back, smoldering at the camera.
His stomach twisted. He typed their names with clumsy fingers.
The page loaded. Threads. Hundreds of them. Joong/Pond Analysis: The Eyes Don’t Lie. That touch during Bangkok soundcheck… Meta: Why their off-stage dynamic confirms a deeper bond.
He clicked one. It was a series of gifs. Joong adjusting Pond’s microphone. Pond brushing lint off Joong’s shoulder. A look held a beat too long across a crowded press conference. Moments Dunk had witnessed and explained away. Brotherly. Professional. Best friends.
The commentary was fervent, detailed, dissecting every micro-expression. “Here, Joong’s gaze drops to Pond’s mouth for 0.7 seconds. That’s not platonic.” “Pond’s protective stance here is textbook…”
He wasn’t seeing a lie. He was seeing a truth everyone had decoded but him. The evidence was all there, pixelated and looping endlessly for the entertainment of strangers.
A new thread, posted just an hour ago, was titled: Concert Night Speculation: Something’s OFF. His breath hitched.
Anyone else backstage tonight? Saw Joong and Pond having a MASSIVE whispered argument by the loading dock after the encore. Looked intense. Pond was shaking. Joong looked wrecked. Something went down.
The comments piled up.
Probably just tired.
Disagreement over a cue?
Or… a lover’s spat?
The last comment had a winking emoji. It had fifty likes.
Dunk’s vision tunneled. The glowing screen was the only light in the world. A lover’s spat. They’d been seen. Their tension, their guilt, had been visible. A public performance of their private catastrophe.
He shut the phone off. The darkness was absolute.
He started walking again, no longer away, but with a direction now. The numbness was burning away, replaced by a sharp, clarifying rage. It was clean. It was simple. It was better than the shattered, hollow feeling.
He wouldn’t delete the photos. He wouldn’t scream or cry. He would remember. He would learn every detail of the lie.
He reached his apartment building as the sky was lightening to a dirty gray. In the silent elevator, he watched his reflection in the metal doors—a pale ghost with hollow eyes. His own face looked like a stranger’s.
He unlocked his door. The familiar scent of home—laundry detergent, the vanilla candle Joong liked—hit him like a poison. He didn’t turn on the lights. He went straight to the bathroom, flipped the switch, and confronted himself in the harsh, unforgiving glare.
The boyish charm everyone talked about looked like weakness now. The softness was naivety. He leaned on the sink, gripping the cool porcelain until his knuckles turned white. The first tear that fell wasn’t a sob; it was a hot, angry streak of saltwater that he swiped away violently.
From the other room, through the thin wall, he heard his landline begin to ring. It was an old, shrill sound he never heard anymore. Only a handful of people had that number.
His parents. His manager.
Pond.
It rang and rang in the empty apartment, a desperate, mechanical sound echoing in the dawn. Dunk stood in the blinding light of the bathroom, watching himself in the mirror, and did not move.
The phone finally stopped ringing. The silence it left behind was worse. It seeped into the apartment, thick and accusing. Dunk released the sink, his fingers stiff. He walked back into the living room, the early morning light bleeding around the edges of the blinds, painting everything in shades of gray and blue.
His gaze fell on the couch. That’s where Joong had fallen asleep last week, his head in Dunk’s lap, complaining about choreography practice. Dunk had run his fingers through Joong’s hair until his breathing evened out.
He couldn’t breathe here.
He grabbed his keys and a jacket from the floor, not Joong’s, just his own. He left the apartment, the door clicking shut on the scent of vanilla and memory.
The city at dawn was a different creature. The chaos was muted, replaced by delivery trucks and street sweepers, the pavement slick from a recent hosing-down. He walked without thinking, his feet carrying him on a route worn familiar by late-night convenience store runs and early morning calls.
He ended up at the small, fenced-in park near Pond’s old apartment. They’d spent stupid hours here after filming sometimes, too wired to go home, talking about everything and nothing on the rusted swings. Dunk pushed through the gate. The swing chains were cold and wet with dew.
He sat, not swinging, just letting the cold metal seep through his jeans.
His phone, still on ‘Do Not Disturb’, lit up in his pocket. A notification from a news aggregator. JASPER’s Joong Spotted Leaving Venue Solo, Looks Distraught After Stellar Show.
He didn’t click it. He could imagine the grainy photo, the speculative article. The comments section would already be a war zone of fan theories.
“He’ll never forgive us.”
Pond’s voice was on a loop in his head. The ‘us’ was a grenade. It meant conspiracy. It meant shared secret. It meant Joong and Pond were on one side of a line, and he was alone on the other.
A jogger padded by on the path, headphones on, lost in a rhythm Dunk couldn’t hear. Normal life. It felt obscene.
He pulled out his phone again. He opened his direct messages with Pond. The last one was from two days ago. A stupid meme about a cat wearing a hat. Dunk had replied with a laughing emoji. He scrolled up. Easy banter. Dinner plans. “Bring the spicy noodles, I’ll get the beer.” “Joong says he’s filming late but will try to crash.”
He tapped the call button.
It rang once. Twice. On the third ring, it connected. There was a choked breath, then silence.
“Pond.” Dunk’s voice was flat. It didn’t sound like a question.
“Dunk. Oh god. Where are you? Are you okay?” Pond’s words tumbled out in a rush, thick with relief and panic.
“Was it just the once?”
The silence on the other end was different now. Heavy. Lying silence.
“Dunk… it’s not that simple.”
“It’s a really simple question, Pond. Yes or no. Was tonight the first time you kissed him?”
He could hear Pond breathing, could almost see him running a hand over his face, the way he did when a problem had no easy solution. “No.”
The word was quiet. Final. It landed in Dunk’s gut, a confirmation of the awful, expanding truth.
“How long?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me!” The shout ripped out of him, echoing in the empty park. The jogger was gone. He was alone with the ghost of his best friend’s voice. He lowered his volume, but the intensity sharpened to a blade’s edge. “How long have you and my boyfriend been lying to me?”
“He’s not just your boyfriend!” Pond fired back, his own composure cracking. “He’s my bandmate. He’s my friend. It’s all… it got tangled. It was a mistake that kept happening.”
“A mistake.” Dunk repeated the word, tasting its pathetic insufficiency. “Where? When? In dressing rooms? In my apartment, after I fell asleep?”
“Stop it.”
“Tell me.”
“I can’t.” Pond’s voice broke. “I can’t do this on the phone. Please, let me see you. Let me explain.”
“Explain what? The logistics? The timing? Or are you going to explain why?” Dunk’s laugh was a short, harsh sound. “Actually, don’t. I think I finally get the why.”
“You don’t. You really don’t.” Pond was crying now, messy, audible tears. “He loves you. It’s you, Dunk. It’s always been you. This… this was just… noise. Stress. Proximity.”
“Noise.” Dunk looked up at the graying sky. “You were noise. He was noise. My best friend and the love of my life. Just… static.” He stood up from the swing, the chain groaning. “You know what the fans are saying online right now? They’re saying you two have crazy chemistry. They’re writing stories about it. They saw it. Everyone saw it but me.”
“It’s performance! It’s our jobs!”
“Was it a performance backstage tonight?” Dunk asked, cold again. The anger was freezing over, forming a permafrost layer over everything. “Look. I called for one reason. To hear you say it. You said it. So we’re done.”
“Dunk, no—“
He ended the call. He blocked Pond’s number on this line too. Then, methodically, he opened his social media. He went to his profile. There was a picture from a month ago. The three of them, arms around each other, grinning at the camera. He was in the middle.
He deleted it.
He untagged himself from every photo with Joong. He changed his privacy settings. The digital erasure was swift, surgical. Each click was a stitch pulled from the fabric of his life, leaving gaps that let in a cold draft.
His phone lit up. This time, it was his manager, Khao. The real world, intruding. He answered.
“Dunk? Thank god. Where are you? Joong’s been calling me all night, he’s hysterical. Something about a fight? The label is getting nervous. There’s… there’s a picture starting to circulate from a fan backstage. It’s blurry, but it’s you walking away from them, and you look… upset.”
Of course. There was always a picture.
“I’m fine,” Dunk said, his voice perfectly, professionally even. “Joong and I are done. Personal matter. I’ll need a few days.”
Khao was silent for a long moment. Managers hated personal matters. “Done? Dunk, the publicity, the brand deals you two have jointly, the—“
“Handle it,” Dunk said, and the steel in his tone was new. “Or I will. And my statement will be a lot less careful than whatever the PR team cooks up.”
He hung up before Khao could argue.
The sun was properly up now, a weak yellow wash over the city. The park was still empty. He felt empty too. Drained of the rage, the tears, the screaming. What was left was a cold, clear certainty.
He wouldn’t hide. He wouldn’t be the pathetic, wounded party they had to manage.
He left the park and walked towards the main avenue. He needed coffee from the place that didn’t know his name or his face. He needed the noise of strangers. He needed to remember how to be a person who wasn’t defined by two other people.
As he turned the corner, a black SUV with tinted windows slowed, keeping pace with him on the nearly empty street. His heart hammered, a single, violent beat of old instinct. It stopped ahead of him.
The passenger window slid down.
It was Joong. He looked like hell. His stage makeup was smudged under his eyes, his hair a mess, his clothes the same sequined jacket from hours before, now looking ridiculous in the harsh daylight.
His eyes, red-rimmed and desperate, found Dunk’s. “Please,” he said, the word raw. “Five minutes.”
Dunk kept walking. He passed the SUV without slowing, his eyes fixed on the café sign a block away. The vehicle idled at the curb.
Then he heard the door open and slam shut. Quick footsteps on the pavement followed him.
“Dunk! Just stop! Just look at me!”
Dunk stopped. He turned. He made himself look. He took in the devastation on Joong’s face, the trembling hands, the sheer, unvarnished agony. A month ago, it would have shattered him. Now, he observed it from behind his wall of ice.
“Five minutes,” Joong pleaded, closing the distance between them. The street was still quiet. “You owe me that.”
“I don’t owe you anything,” Dunk said, but his feet were rooted. This was the confrontation he’d been circling. The air between them crackled, charged with everything broken.
Joong opened his mouth to speak, to spin his explanation, his apology, his plea. Dunk watched him, waiting for the words that would try to rebuild a bridge he had already burned.
He was ready to let them burn, too.