INTERLUDE: The Eye in the Sky

AEWOL RESORT, JEJU ISLAND - DAY 1 - 7AM
LIA

Light.

A pressure behind her eyelids. Warm and golden and insistent, still too early to be colour or shape, the way sunlight leans against a window and waits.

Her body knew things before she did. Sheets pooled at her waist. Cotton against her stomach - the thin kind, hotel-washed until it felt like nothing. One arm folded beneath the pillow at an angle that would hurt later. Warmth along her left side that breathed.

She was somewhere.

The light pressed harder. She let it.

A sound detonated through the wall - tinny but violent, the compressed blast of hyperpop through a phone speaker cranked to maximum. Yet, But. Yuna's alarm. Because Shin Yuna set her morning alarm to her own solo at a volume that matched her personality: deranged, unapologetic, and somehow endearing despite the auditory assault.

Her hand emerged from the sheets and found her phone on the nightstand by muscle memory. The screen was too bright - she'd been listening to a Kehlani deep cut before bed, the Spotify player still frozen mid-song, the progress bar abandoned at two minutes thirty-seven like a bookmark in a novel she'd finish later. She swiped past it. Past a Coupang notification for the LP she'd been stalking for three weeks. Past a half-drafted text to her mother she'd compose properly when she was vertical and functioning.

She squinted at a group chat already in eruption - Ryujin texting from a clinic about rounds she'd apparently lost count of, Chaeryeong capslock-panicking about it, Yuna asking if Ryujin's pussy was okay with three crying emojis. Standard ITZY morning communications.

She typed stiill slleping sryy with one thumb, eyes barely open, and muted the chat before it could vibrate again. Ryujin's pelvic updates could wait.

Phone down, eyes closed, the world dissolved back into warmth and weight and the slow thud of a second heartbeat.

Gone.

A stripe of sun had moved.

It lay across the foot of the bed now, a solid bar of gold cutting diagonally across white linen. She noticed it the way you notice a good outfit on someone across a restaurant - the composition of it, the angle that meant mid-morning, that meant they'd slept through breakfast, that meant the Jeju sun had climbed high enough to clear the villa's eastern eave and pour directly into the guest room's only window.

The window was open. She knew without looking. The air had that quality - something alive, salt-edged, carrying the faint mechanical hum of cicadas warming up for their afternoon performance. A breeze touched her bare shoulder where her sleep shirt had slipped down, and goosebumps rose along her arm in a slow wave.

The sheets were good. Genuinely good - the kind of cotton that had been washed enough times to lose its stiffness without losing its density. Thread count high enough to matter, low enough that someone had chosen these for feel rather than status. She’d slept in a hundred hotel beds across twelve countries and could rank them by fabric weight alone.

A body shifted behind her.

Gone.

Somewhere in the villa, a headboard was hitting a wall.

The sound arrived as rhythm before meaning - thunk, thunk, thunk - the unmistakable percussion of furniture being tested beyond its engineering specifications. Muffled, filtered through drywall and distance, but distinct. Accompanied by something higher-pitched. A voice. Female. The kind of sound that started in the chest and climbed.

Yeji's room. Headboard.

The thought surfaced at quarter-speed, diagnostic and drowsy. Yeji hadn't mentioned anyone. No boyfriend, no situationship, no one on the roster as far as Lia knew - and Lia usually knew. Toy, maybe. Or someone from last night's rave.

Then a man's voice - low, strained, something that might have been a name. Not a toy, then. The rhythm intensified. A final sharp cry, truncated, and then quiet.

She processed none of this with urgency. The information filed itself somewhere in the back of her skull - noted, archived, revisit later - and she sank below verbal again, pulled down by the arm draped heavy across her waist. Minjun. The weight of him was familiar, the heaviness of deep sleep, his breathing slow against the back of her neck. He smelled like the hotel shampoo and last night's soju and something underneath that was just skin, just him.

His arm tightened reflexively as she shifted, pulling her closer without waking. Her body listened to itself for half a second - an old habit, the ghost of a reflex from months when waking up meant checking: Am I okay? Is this anxiety or just morning? Can I do today?

The scan came back clean. Warmth in her chest. Quiet in her skull. The doing-nothing she'd taught herself during the worst of it - that being still was its own skill, that rest wasn't laziness but practice, the same way holding a note was practice. Her body knew how to be still now. She'd trained it.

Minjun's arm and the Jeju sun making the sheets glow like paper lanterns.

She sank deeper. Let the warmth take her.

Gone.

SPLASH.

Her eyes shot open.

A full system reboot - consciousness slamming online like a house light snapping to full on an empty stage, skipping every gentle gradient of the previous fades. She was upright before she'd finished processing the sound, sheets pooling at her waist, her heart hammering with the adrenaline of a noise too large to be ignored.

Water. A massive displacement of it. The unmistakable crack of a body hitting a pool surface at speed, followed by a secondary wave that sloshed and echoed off tile. Then laughter - breathless, startled, a voice she knew. Yuna. And underneath it, lower, a man's voice. Someone else's.

The window was open. She'd opened it herself at four in the morning, stumbling back from the Aewol Beach Resort rave with her vintage Ralph Lauren slip dress on inside-out and Minjun's hand on her lower back, steering her through the hallway where Ryujin - somehow still awake after her own debauchery - had pointed at the inverted seams and said nice look, unnie with the smirk of a woman who had zero moral high ground and knew it. Lia had been too drunk to care. She'd burned through her social battery two hours into the rave and spent the rest of the night people-watching from a corner booth with a gin and tonic, cataloguing the dance floor the way she catalogued everything - silently, precisely, from a comfortable distance. Minjun had danced for both of them. He always did. He'd flipped the dress right-side-out while she leaned on the wall, and then she'd opened the window because the room was spinning and she needed the ocean air or she was going to be sick on the duvet.

She was on her feet before she'd decided to move, padding barefoot across the hardwood in Minjun's oversized t-shirt and a pair of sleep shorts that had ridden up past any reasonable definition of coverage. The t-shirt hung off one shoulder, the neckline stretched wide enough to show her collarbone and the soft upper slope of her chest - full, rounded, the kind of body built from entirely different blueprints than the sharp-angled athletes she shared a stage with. Where Yeji was all muscle and discipline and visible ab lines, Lia was curves. Soft thighs that touched when she walked, hips that filled out the sleep shorts until the fabric gave up pretending it was covering anything, a gentle roundness to her stomach that the industry had spent five years trying to starve out of her and failing. She'd made peace with it. More than peace - she'd won the war, and the treaty was written in the way Minjun's eyes tracked her across the room every single morning like she was the only thing in it worth looking at.

Her hair was a disaster. Pillow-flattened on one side, tangled from tossing, the kind of bedhead that would require negotiation and conditioner to resolve. She pushed it out of her face with both hands as she reached the window - the motion lifting the t-shirt's hem high enough to flash the crease where thigh met hip, the soft undercurve of her ass, sleep shorts riding so high they'd become a suggestion rather than a garment.

She looked down.

The pool deck spread out below her like a stage. Bright sun, blue water still rocking from the impact, two bodies surfacing in a tangle of limbs and laughter. Yuna's black bikini - the one with the gold chain straps, the one she'd been posting thirst traps in all week - was already in disarray, one strap hanging off her shoulder, the sash gone entirely. Next to her, a man. Taller, broader, dark hair plastered to his forehead. Naked. Visibly, comprehensively naked, his towel a white puddle on the deck tiles six metres from the pool edge.

And visibly, comprehensively hard - the water was shallow enough at the edge that the refracted outline left zero ambiguity.

Lia's brain completed its boot sequence.

Her eyes narrowed. Her chin tilted three degrees to the left - the angle of assessment, the angle she'd perfected across a thousand fansign tables and backstage hallways, the tilt that meant she'd switched to active cataloguing.

Yuna. Pool. Naked man. Erection. Mid-morning. Yeji's bedroom had just gone quiet.

The arithmetic took less than a second.

"Jagiya." Her voice came out level, controlled, the sleepiness burned away so completely it might never have existed. Her eyes stayed on the window. "Camera."

Behind her, Minjun groaned into the pillow. "Wha - ?"

"My phone. Nightstand. Bring it."

A pause. The rustle of sheets. His voice, still gravelled with sleep: "What's happening?"

"Yuna is in the pool with a man and I need my phone in my hand in the next four seconds or I will never forgive you."

"A man? What man -"

"Three seconds."