Last Light

[MINHO'S POV]

"- and that." Giselle spread her hands. "Is how I ended up deepthroating a microphone by accident."

The fire popped. Everyone lost it at once.

"So yeah," she continued, picking her drink back up. "That's networking for you."

Ryujin came up onto her knees with both hands already in the air while Yunjin got to the whistle first, two fingers jammed in her mouth as the pair of them screamed loud enough to turn a sand pit into the back end of an encore while Ryujin clapped with her whole arms.

"That," Yunjin shouted, throwing both arms wide enough to claim broadcast rights, "was CINEMA."

Ryujin pressed a hand to her chest and bowed her head. "Director's cut with unpaid staff overtime."

They kept lobbing it back and forth because they'd been at it all night, getting loud and finding each other across the gap between two groups before silently agreeing the rest of us were just the audience at a music-show prerecording who should clap when prompted, so Giselle dipped her chin to take the praise.

But Chaeryeong scrunched her whole face up and chewed her lip while replaying the story, desperately hunting for the part where it became a romance.

"But after," she pressed, leaning in. "Was there - a moment?"

Giselle gave her one slow blink.

"I gave him our manager's contact."

Chaeryeong slumped forward into Sunwoo's side. Sunwoo doubled over and pushed his face into her shoulder to muffle it, one arm hauling her close. He kissed the top of her head between laughs. She let him reel her in, scowling into his collarbone.

Ningning reached over and smacked Giselle's palm without lifting her eyes off her marshmallow. "Queen." She rotated the skewer with great seriousness.

Winter had spent the whole story at war with a marshmallow. I'd watched it sideways the entire time. The marshmallow slid off the skewer. Winter pushed it back on. It caught fire. Winter blew it out. It slumped off the stick into the coals. She'd lost three of them this way. She came up from the latest drop with her cheeks stuffed full of sugar, holding the empty skewer out.

"Wait." Winter looked from Giselle to Ningning, chewing fast now that the group had apparently moved on. "What happened?"

"I'll tell you later." Ningning reached over and turned Winter's skewer away from the fire before it could claim a fourth victim.

Winter swallowed with visible effort. "But I was here! I only looked away because it was burning."

"It's over, unnie. Just eat the evidence."

"That doesn't count." Winter waved the empty skewer at Ningning, then at the coals. "It was on fire. I fixed it."

Over at the edge of the blanket, Karina smiled at the marshmallow disaster until Giselle flicked her a look and Karina met it, both their smiles dropping as they stared flat at each other and then coming right back up for the group, so even if I had no idea what actually happened in the unedited version of Giselle's night, I'd lay bets her leader already had the full report.

I stood behind Yeji, my thumbs working the knot at the top of her spine, watching the firelight hit her face. I didn't plan on letting any of this go.

"Okay, we need a photo."

Chaeryeong recovered from her grief and popped up on her knees. "We HAVE to. Everyone's here, everyone looks good, the fire's perfect. Lia-ya, you have your phone."

Lia picked up her phone from the sand.

"Okay, group shot." Lia woke the screen, the blue light washing up over her face. "Hold on. I'll prop it. The timer's in here somewhere."

She frowned at the phone as her thumb moved across two screens and the frown got worse.

"Why do they move this every update," Lia grumbled. "There's a guy in California getting promoted for ruining eomeoni photo time." She tilted the phone, then tilted her head without taking her eyes off the screen. "Minho-oppa, come help me with this?"

I blinked, mostly because there were over a dozen people around this fire and half of them could've set a phone timer in their sleep while Yuna had probably done a fancam tutorial on it while eating gimbap in a van, but before I could point any of this out Yeji's hand came down flat on my thigh and shoved.

"Go help her." Yeji shoved my thigh again. "You're standing there doing nothing."

I went while Ryujin watched with filth tucked behind her grin, but since Lia was already patting the sand beside her I let Ryujin's comment wait and crouched next to her where I could see her phone sitting open on the home screen with no camera app in sight.

"I'm always the one taking the pictures," Lia muttered, turning the phone sideways, then upside down, then back again. "I never actually have to set the timer to be in the shot, so you hold it landscape, right, and then..."

"Lia."

"...and then the little icon, it used to be on the left..."

"Lia."

She stopped and leaned in close enough that the firelight left most of her face dark.

"I saw what happened on the pool deck." Lia whispered.

My jaw locked as I stared at the side of her head, remembering how days ago I'd heard her mention footage and how I'd carried that panic through every meal and every laugh and every time Yeji touched me in front of people since one video could turn this beach into Dispatch bait before breakfast.

"I know," I said quietly. "I know there's a video."

Her eyebrows climbed.

"Oh?" Lia's fingers rubbed the edge of the phone case.

I kept my mouth shut while she kept looking at me until she finally shrugged.

"Well, it's gone." Her mouth tipped up at the corner. "Some things you watch once and let go."

I sat there with my hands empty and made myself nod because some things didn't need saying, and she watched the nod and plucked the phone back before her thumb tapped the screen and the camera opened with the timer in the center.

"Good luck figuring it out!" Lia gave my shoulder a suspiciously fake pat before moving back towards the assembled group.

She barely made it into the fray before Yuna's arm shot out of the hoodie to hook her round the waist while Chaeryeong grabbed her sleeve from the other side, making Lia stumble into the knot of her own members with a surprised laugh.

I stood up with the phone and let my shoulders drop along with my jaw unclenching.

I wedged the phone into the neck of an empty soju bottle stuck in the sand, pointed it at everyone, and started herding a dozen drunk bodies into one frame.

Everyone sorted themselves out fast. Yeji and Ryujin folded into each other in the middle, Ryujin's arm slung heavy over Yeji's shoulders and Yeji's hand fisted in the back of Ryujin's sleeveless hoodie. Chaeryeong tucked under Sunwoo's arm with her palm flat on his chest, and he turned his whole body toward her. Lia let Minjun pull her back against him at the edge of the shot, his chin at her temple, both of them grinning.

aespa clumped into their own corner. Karina sat low and central. Winter dropped in right beside her, using the borrowed time to cram a whole s'more into her mouth. The camera was about to catch their leader next to a girl with both cheeks stuffed with marshmallow. Giselle and Ningning boxed them in, still bickering, Ningning's hands up, Giselle's eyebrow up higher.

Yunjin loomed at the back, iced americano held high, mouth already open to yell.

"Okay. Timer, ten seconds." I hit it and jogged into the gap they'd left me at Yeji's side.

She turned into me before I'd even stopped moving, bringing an arm around the back of my neck to curl her fingers into my hair and drag me down to her height. While keeping her other arm locked round Ryujin's waist, she let her thumb drag slowly along the cord behind my ear.

"Smile!" Chaeryeong shrieked.

FLASH.

The flash blew the circle white. Everybody got caught mid-laugh, mid-yell, mid-chew. Then the dark came back and everyone broke formation to fight over the phone and see who looked insane.

I let them swarm the screen. I already had the only detail I actually cared about anyway, just knowing I finally made the frame.

Winter had been picking at her guitar on and off for the last hour, half-songs and practice-room fragments, her small idol hands refusing to rest even on vacation. The strings were a little out, because borrowed beach guitars are instruments in the same sense convenience-store triangle kimbap is dinner. Nobody asked her to play, but she kept doing it anyway under everyone else's noise.

Yunjin recognized it first. She'd flopped down next to Winter with her americano, and at one chord change her head snapped up.

"Wait!" Yunjin grabbed Winter's forearm and stopped the strings. "Wait, wait. Minjeongie, is that the one we used to do? In the dorm? The ABBA one?"

Winter looked down at her own hands, then back at Yunjin. "... I just put my fingers where they used to go."

"Oh my gosh!" Yunjin bounced up onto her knees so fast her americano sloshed. "We sang this every night for a YEAR. Play it - play it properly, do the thing."

Winter blinked once, accepted this as a reasonable assignment, and set the guitar against her stomach. Her fingers found the chords properly, and the noodling became an actual song.

I knew it the second she played it properly. Everyone in their twenties knew it. The song your mother played in the car on the way back from Sokcho, the one you pretended not to know until the chorus betrayed you. A summer song for people already packing their bags.

For the last night of a trip nobody wanted to end, it was attempted murder with guitar accompaniment. Half the people around this fire were getting on a plane in the morning.

And so we sang.

Giselle came in first on the vocal, of course she did, because she was the only one of us who'd grown up with the English version on the radio. About a line in, born menace that she was, she swapped a word.

"The feeling right," she sang, then glanced sideways at the rest of us. "The Jeju night."

She did it under her breath the first time, testing the crime. Everyone caught it.

"The Jeju night," she repeated, louder, because nobody had stopped her.

"It works!" Giselle lifted one hand against the groans, unrepentant, and kept going.

Yunjin pointed at her across the fire, found her sworn enemy, and took a lower harmony just to refuse matching Giselle. The two of them started a rap-beef inside a campfire singalong. Ningning heard the crime in progress and grinned into her marshmallow.

And then Yunjin pointed at me.

"STUDIO GUY." Yunjin slapped a hand to her chest. "Studio monitor guy is just STANDING there. He does this for a LIVING. Get up here, get up, you don't get to lurk."

"I'm okay -"

"Ning. Get him a mic."

Ningning picked one of Winter's blackened marshmallow corpses off the skewer and lobbed it at me underhand. I caught the charred thing reflexively. She beamed and gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up.

I looked to Yeji for an exit. She was the one person here with the authority to call them off, and she looked back up at me from the sand, considered my dignity, then fed it to the gulls.

"You're good at singing." Yeji gave me the smallest smile, which was crueler than mockery. "Go sing for us."

She put her hand on the small of my back and pushed, which was how I ended up on my feet at a bonfire holding a burnt marshmallow for a microphone while a member of LE SSERAFIM conducted me with both hands and a cup of iced coffee.

After getting rid of me, Yeji immediately crossed to the other blanket and dropped down between her girls. Yuna immediately burrowed into her side with her head straight to Yeji's shoulder, and Ryujin leaned in from the other side to sit shoulder to shoulder so Yeji could sit between the two of them with an arm around each and let herself be held.

I came in on the song low and careful while feeling for the tune under Winter's chords before pushing steadier, and the circle threw me a small holler that made me feel ridiculous and warm right up until they realized I wasn't gonna run and let me carry the lead so they could shriek behind me.

"I can still recall," I sang, and the fire cracked low between us. "Our last summer."

Halfway through the second verse, this trip started lining itself up behind the melody.

I looked around the fire.

"But underneath we had a fear of flying," I sang.

"Of getting old," the circle answered, quieter now. "A fear of slowly dying."

Nobody touched that one.

Yeji and Ryujin sat pressed together on the blanket, a far cry from last night when I'd sat in the dark and listened to them scream at each other through the walls of the villa, because now Ryujin kept her arm slung heavy over Yeji's shoulders while Yeji kept her fingers twisted into the fabric of Ryujin's shirt.

The chorus came around so I lifted the marshmallow like a trainee I once was.

"I can still recall our last summer," I sang.

Everyone came in after me. "I still see it all."

My eyes found Yuna sitting half-swallowed by her hoodie and resting her cheek against Yeji's shoulder as she barely sang along, looking nothing like two days ago at the pool when she'd strutted straight at me in that lethal bikini, since right now she just had one hand fisted in Yeji's sleeve with her eyelids drooping on "I still see it all."

"Our last summer," I sang.

"MORNING SAMGYEOP," Yunjin bellowed suddenly, mangling some breakfast lyric into a pork-belly disaster that fit the melody exactly nowhere. Ryujin lost it and folded sideways off Yeji laughing. Giselle put her face in her hands. For one glorious second we were all eighteen, underslept, and too loud on a beach.

I pulled the song back before Yunjin could invent a second pork product.

"Living for the day," I sang, and nobody improved on it.

"Worries far away."

The jokes stopped. We sang it straight because we'd been doing exactly that for three days, and morning had plane tickets.

I kept going around the fire.

Karina sat back from the fire with a soft smile, sweating and loud in the sand, and I didn't have to wonder what lived underneath her pristine idol act anymore because two nights ago I'd watched her mascara smear down her cheeks while she begged into a couch cushion with my dick buried deep inside her.

Lia lifted her chin at me across the fire before turning back to whatever Minjun was murmuring into her ear, having deleted the evidence of my pool-deck disaster without asking for a single thing in return. Next to her, Chaeryeong snuggled under Sunwoo's arm. She'd spent the whole trip digging for a grand romance in everyone else's mess, but right now she just held her boyfriend's hand and leaned against him, proving that even among a group of catastrophically horny idols, things could still be simple.

The song tipped past its middle, right where the second vocal comes in and lets the woman answer.

Yuna picked her head up off Yeji's shoulder.

"Unnie," she started, lifting her head. "You should be up there. Singing with your boyfriend."

Yeji immediately went straight. "He's not my boyf -"

"Bitch, please." Ryujin cut her off, got two hands on Yeji's shoulder, braced one foot in the sand, and shoved, launching Yeji up off the blanket with a grunt of pure exertion. "For fuck's sake, Yeddeong, let yourself be happy for ONCE in your life."

Yeji stumbled across the sand on Ryujin's shove and fetched up against me with both hands flat against my chest.

She looked up at me.

I looked down at her with a burnt marshmallow in my hand and zero plan in my head, so I just shrugged at her. Her shoulders dropped first and then her mouth loosened as she surrendered to the public humiliation of sincerity.

I held the marshmallow up between us.

She huffed through her nose, put her hand over mine around the stupid charred thing, and came in on the woman's verse.

The circle lost its mind when the next verse gave them a name to ruin.

"And now you're on Music Bank," Giselle sang, and slapped her own knee like she'd solved art.

"The solo stan," Ryujin threw in.

"The Instagram," Ningning added, too fast and delighted with herself.

Yunjin planted one hand over her heart and belted, "And your name is Hanni," with full operatic vibrato.

Hanni wasn't at this bonfire. Nobody cared.

Then somebody hollered "YEJI," and the whole circle howled.

Yeji sang through all of it, the goofy version and the names and the noise. Then she hit the next line and quit joking.

"Yet you're the hero of my dreams," she sang, looking right at me. After the week we'd had, after everything I knew now, I had to tighten my grip on that stupid marshmallow stick to keep my hand steady.

Off to the side, Chaeryeong made a small wet sound and pressed her fingers to her mouth, openly swooning, and for once not one single person teased her for it.

I stopped looking around after that. Because I had her hand over mine and her eyes on my face, and when the chorus came back around she rasped "our last summer" like it cost her pride, which it probably did, but she was here and I was here so I just sang the rest to the actual girl in my arms instead of some future version I was already mourning like an idiot.

Behind us, the best parts kept happening in the corners. Karina drifted over to Winter mid-chorus, folded down behind her, wrapped both arms around her from the back, and hooked her chin over Winter's shoulder. She rocked them slowly, half lullaby and half hostage situation. Winter squirmed on principle, then gave up and let it happen, still chewing. By the last chorus Karina had her eyes shut, cheek tucked into Winter's hair, singing quietly to her because tomorrow was gonna be hard enough. Ningning sang the whole thing a quarter-tone flat and gave zero fucks. Yunjin held the final note about four bars longer than anyone else, fist in the air, americano sloshing, the loudest person on the beach because she was the only one who didn't know what the song meant to the rest of us.

I wanted to remember it exactly like this, ridiculous marshmallow and all.

The song had been mocking us from bar one. Fair play.

The fire burned down to glowing coals after the song, and everyone moved slower around them. Lia suggested we lie back and look up, making stargazing sound formal and scheduled. Once the flames dropped, the sky came out properly, the whole messy spill of them over the black water. A dozen people lay on their backs in the sand, drunk and full, picking out the two constellations anybody knew and arguing softly about the rest.

I lay there with my hands behind my head feeling more settled than I'd been in years, having let Yeji wander off a few minutes ago when she waved her phone and mumbled something about taking photos of the sky, but when I turned my head expecting to find her somewhere nearby in the dark I got only sand and Ryujin's knee.

I came up on my elbows.

I checked the blanket and the fire and the loose scatter of bodies without finding her.

Then I scanned the dark.

A camera flash popped sharp and bright far past the edge of our firelight where the sand gave way to black volcanic rock.

The sudden white glare washed over the old basalt columns, catching a solitary figure standing at the top of the cliff with a phone held up to the empty sky.

"Minho."

Ryujin had appeared at my shoulder out of nowhere and crouched low next to me with her eyes already up on the cliff.

"You really gonna let her stand up there and freeze to death by herself?" she said.

"Right," I said, getting to my feet.

I took one step toward the rocks before her hand closed around my forearm and stopped me hard.

I looked down to find Ryujin keeping her eyes on Yeji with her nails digging into my skin.

"She let you all the way in." Ryujin kept her grip on my arm. "You know how rare that is for her?"

Her fingers tightened.

"Hurt her, and I'll fucking kill you. I mean it."

She let me go and returned to the sand before I could answer, dropping down with the others to put her hands behind her head and look up at the stars.

I turned toward the cliff and the wind off the water and Yeji standing alone at the top of it, and started walking.