Exciting; Illegal

Relief comes into her life like a wave—all of life has been grains of sand poured haphazard and tumultuous into a pot, shaken and drowned and drained and drowned, and now, finally, it is beginning to settle. Life comes into focus like a picture, blurry when you take it, but somehow, miraculously, when you look at it later it’s sharp and clear. Everything that happened was meant to be, and everything that will happen is because of everything else that has happened. Thank God.
As years go on, Jeongin starts to be friends with other idols, people her age. Not that she doesn’t love her unnies, but it’s different, being same-age friends. You can be more vulnerable, somehow, and yet stronger. They talk about their jobs, how they struggled as trainees, how even though things can be difficult now it’s so much easier.
Beomgyu ends up being one of her favorite friends. They get it, they struggled with the same sorts of insecurities—I mean, how do you live up to being in a group with the trainee that never dipped lower than number one in evals? How do you live up to being in a group with some of the most prolific producers in the industry? Beomgyu gets it like no one does, and when they text or hang out or call while playing games sometimes Innie thinks that nobody else would—that the two of them are the only two people in the world who understand.
Beomgyu’s group is mostly introverts. They stick to themselves; sometimes one or two of them will show up at a covert industry party but in general they enjoy their alone time to recharge, happy with a new anime or some quality gaming time. Still, their association with BTS and Soobin and Yeonjun’s MC stints mean that they know everyone in the industry, maybe even more than Chan’s seemingly endless roster of idol friends. It’s casual, how Beomgyu mentions Yeonjun’s friend Holland, but Jeongin’s heard of Holland. He’s gay. Everyone knows he's gay. But Beomgyu doesn’t mention it—just chats about his music and his partner and how Yeonjun invited him over but forgot to tell the other members and Soobin got mad. Beomgyu doesn’t care that he’s gay, she realizes.
Beomgyu’s safe. Not that Jeongin’s gay—she probably just got confused, she decided.

SKZ has a couple introverts, but when they’re together they certainly don’t act like it. They hang out all the time, sometimes casually or accidentally and sometimes they hang out as A Gathering—a party, really, but only for them, their little family.
It’s nice, those parties. Jeongin is a quiet drunk, she knows, whereas Seungmin gets surprisingly loud. She’s been blooming lately, showing STAY what the rest of them already knew—she’s a mischievous little bugger, and funny as hell, more likely to start shit just for the fun of it than anyone else and equally as likely to diffuse the tension with a dry joke. She’s gotten really pretty, lately, too, and Jeongin always finds herself telling her that when she’s a bottle of soju deep and feeling fuzzy and warm. Felix is clingy as all get out—no surprise—and once she legitimately forgot English and just blinked for a solid minute when Sungie said something to her in what was supposed to be her mother tongue. Of course, both Jisung and Felix have the tendency to swap languages every other sentence when they’re really drunk, weirdos. Jisung oscillates between jumping around the room like she’s on fire and latching on to the nearest unnie like a leech, nuzzling into them like a particularly affectionate little puppy craving pats. Hyunjin, usually so active and mobile, likes to sprawl. She doesn’t really pay attention half the time, and is really giggly the other half, but Changbin likes to make her laugh, so usually they end up together. Minho is wicked in a way she can’t be in public, and her and Chan usually start talking about....well....usually it’s incredibly sexual. Minho is the biggest one out of them to make use of the non-disclosure agreements their company lawyer awkwardly emailed to them after the dating ban was up. Chan doesn’t drink anymore, but she feeds off the others’ energy enough to still act a little wilder, and...well. There’s a song sitting on her laptop right now destined for a future SKZ-record album release all about how often she enjoys the...company...of some of her idol friends.
Lixie and Sungie like to play games when they get drunk, especially when they’re together, terrible twins as they are. Once they tried to make everyone do a list of 36 Questions That Lead To Love, but the website was in English and translate apps only go so far, so it just ended up being the two of them in a corner, staring deeply into each others eyes and talking quietly while everyone else ate snacks and watched YouTube. They fell asleep like that, actually, propped against the wall, holding hands, still facing each other. Chan and Minho had to carry them to their rooms, but Jeongin knew that they had taken pictures beforehand and left them with a kiss on the forehead, cozily tucked in.

Strangely enough, it’s not on those nights that the most personal stuff comes out—it’s the times where Changbin invites Wooyoung and Yeonjun over, so Jeongin tells Beomgyu to tag along so that they can hang out, and Hongjoong comes too to hang out with Chan and get her opinion on a new track. Then they’re all there, and they might as well break out the soju and beer and be good hosts, right?
Of course it’s Beomgyu who sets the challenge, and of course it’s Yeonjun who rises to it first. The moment will be in her mind forever, Jeongin thinks. Beomgyu, annoyed with the obviously-targeted Never Have I Ever had “Oreo Hair”, staring into Yeonjun’s eyes, leaning forward, saying as if in slow-motion Never Have I Ever Kissed a Girl.
Yeonjun, taking a swig of plum soju without a pause nor a blink. Minho and Jisung, clinking their glasses, drinking in tandem.
Chan, drinking from her glass of juice, looking at Jeongin.
Wooyoung, laughing as she drank before poking knowingly at Changbin. Changbin drinking, red with embarrassment or with alcohol, who knew at this point.
And maybe there were more? Felix was wiping her mouth—had she just drank? Seungmin, sitting next to Jeongin, had been leaning back too far for Jeongin to see unless she looked. Hyunjin was whining, but was it over the taste of her soju or over not knowing about the other members or over missing out?

I have a feeling that you’d find you weren’t the only one in Stray Kids to feel that, hmm?

The first time Jeongin had drank she’d been seventeen, and Stray Kids had confirmed that they would debut. Back then Chan still drank now and again—she stopped during Covid, when she watched a particularly harrowing docu-series about alcoholism—and they had decided on shots for some ungodly reason, taken together as a sign that they’d all be together forever. Vodka— or maybe gin? Regardless, she remembers the taste. It was fine, at first, not her favorite flavor but bearable. But going down—it burned. She could feel it, all the way down, slipping down the throat and settling between the lungs and the diaphragm like lava. That’s what she felt like, right now. She couldn’t pinpoint the emotion, just that it burned. It hurt.

I have a feeling that you’d find you weren’t the only one in Stray Kids to feel that, hmm?

Had she known, at the time? About herself? About the other members? And she kept it from Jeongin...why? Was Jeongin not trustworthy?....was she not trustworthy, years of devout Christianity and the half-baked but passionate idea as a child to be a priest and repetitions of things she’d heard at home enough to make her a suspicious character? She loved her members. She’d always love them, no matter what. They didn’t know?

Fuck. She’d almost done it. Almost convinced herself that she wasn’t a lesbian, was just too jaded by the industry to feel any sort of crushes on the male idols she’d run into, that she wasn’t attracted to girls, that the way she would look at them was purely professional and the dreams that she had at night sometimes were—I mean, everyone has strange, unexplainable dreams sometimes, right? She was normal, she was a good daughter and a good Christian and a good girl.
She didn’t know what normal was anymore.

Are things still the same as they’ve always been, if some unknown fact about them is revealed? Kimchi is kimchi, whether it’s store-made or eomma’s, or some that your friends got from home, but you swear you can tell your eomma’s over any others regardless. A person is still a person, but you treat them differently based on their job and their age and any other number of realized and unrealized factors.
Jeongin’s beloved members were Jeongin’s beloved members, but if they had kissed girls, if they had liked it like their expressions had seemed to let on, what did that mean for Jeongin?

Was it bad that it was Beomgyu she told this time, and not Chan? The TXT dorm was small and maybe a little messy, but so was theirs. Beomgyu’s bed was comfortable, and Beomgyu didn’t care, went as far as teasing Yeonjun about it at that party. She could stare at the ceiling while she talked about it, about being a kid and what the ahjummas had said at church that time and about talking about it with Chan and about feeling so, so alone and small and young and about the party, thinking she had been confused, realizing maybe she hadn’t. Whoever painted the walls in Beomgyu’s bedroom had messed up ever so slightly on the seam between wall and ceiling.
And Beomgyu listened. Beomgyu listened, and didn’t judge, and was generally a very kind person beyond their bouncy exterior, but Beomgyu was also from Daegu and was as blunt and straightforward as that implied.
“Well, Jeongin, are you attracted to girls? Or guys? Or both?” she asked, simple as that.

Jeongin thought about it. About gratuitous ab flashes on MCountdown, about how Chan and Felix could recreate them just as well. About hip pops and gyrations. About chests. About lips. About hands held in hers.

”Fuck,” she sighed.