A Silent Lover

9. TaekWoon

"And Leo-ssi, what about you?" A woman's voice says next to my right, breaking me out of my reverie.

As the interviewer speaks my name, I come out of my stupor and with hard-won ease, keep myself from jumping out of my seat in surprise. I cast my eyes around to my members, trying to look as though I was thinking hard while my mind internally rewound the conversation that had been going on around me.

"Ah... definitely personality is more important than looks. And she has to be sensible and wise. That's what I like most." The lady smiles at me despite my cliché answer and wraps up the interrogation. As one we all rise from the table and make our way out of the studio.

One thing I hated about being an idol had to be the personal questions. It's not that I mind people knowing what my ideal type is, but why do they insist on asking the same questions over and over again. This had to be my fiftieth time answering this question since debut and my answer had never changed.

But this time I had wanted to say that long dark hair and brown skin were also things that I was attracted to. In fact, those very things had made me space out during the interview in the first place and as the members and I rode home from Jellyfish building, my thoughts turned back to Imani.

For the first time in a forever, I was happy about something other than my career, and all that happiness revolved around Imani. And even though I was happy that I could say Imani was now my girlfriend, it seemed that life had conspired to keep us apart. For some reason, I had forgotten who I was and what I did for a living, so when it was time to get serious about our album promotions, I didn't have any time to see Imani.

Between shooting a live video for our album release, fan signing events, and even a mini concert, I hadn't been able to do more than send her a few texts each day to see how she was. Thankfully, or maybe not so much, Imani was also really busy. She had finally gotten her permits to start construction on her new building and it seemed to be occupying most of her time.

The texts that we sent each other were comforting to some degree but the truth was that I missed her. Now that I had spent time in her presence and gotten to know her, I knew what I was missing out on the longer I stayed away. I was more distracted than usual during events and even though no one else had noticed, for the first time something other than being a singer was taking up my thoughts.

We usually had very little time to rest during promotions, but a rare day of peace came on Saturday. I had tried to stay at the dorm and amuse myself by watching TV, but in the end, it was hopeless; variety shows bored me. I wasn't the type of guy to sleep the day away either, so it was still fairly early in the morning when I left for our studio at Jellyfish, thinking that I could at least get some composing done.

I spent an hour in my studio writing nothing but depressing and lonely lyrics until I gave up in frustration. I was getting ready to go for a much-needed coffee when I noticed Ravi in his own studio, seemingly hard at work on his mixtape. Happy for a minute that I could relax with one of my favorite members, I knocked quickly and went inside.

Our private work areas in the dance practice room were small and could really only accommodate two people, but Ravi's space was somewhat bigger than everyone else's and it even had enough room for a cot which I flopped down onto the minute I walked in.

"WonShik-ah, annyeong," I called him in a louder tone of voice than usual so that he would hear me over the hard beat that I could clearly hear through his head phones.

Ravi jumped up in surprise and then sent me a wave, but his attention quickly went back to the piece he was working on. I had expected as much when coming into his studio. I'd never known how hard Ravi worked on his music until we had begun preparing our LR sub-unit promotions together. It was enjoyable watching him work and I found myself sitting there for some long minutes, just listening to his grumbles and watching the time go by.