The Idol I Should Never Have Loved, A Love Story That Should Never Exist

Kim Sok-joo has never been anyone's first choice.

Not his family's. Not his teachers'. Not the world's. From the time he was old enough to understand that some children are claimed and some are tolerated he understood which category he fell into. He was the quiet one. The one people looked past. The black sheep of a family that had never known what to do with him and had eventually stopped trying.

The only person who ever loved him without condition was his grandmother. A small fierce woman who showed love the way practical people show love — through presence, through provision, through staying even when staying was difficult. She had Alzheimer's and some days she forgot his name and some days she forgot his face and on those days Kim would sit beside her and hold her hand and be whoever she needed him to be because she had done the same for him his whole life.

She was the only home he had ever known.

The other thing that kept him alive — especially during the years when alive was not a given — was music. Specifically the music of Rider. Specifically the voice of the group's leader, a man named Charlie whose songs had a specific quality of understanding in them that felt, in the dark hours, like someone had written them directly for Kim's particular brand of loneliness.

Kim never imagined he would meet him.

He certainly never imagined he would manage him.

But life has a specific cruelty for people who have survived too much — it gives them something extraordinary just before it takes it away.

Kim gets the job managing Rider and it is nothing like he imagined.

The members don't trust him. The company views him as a liability. The idol world, which had seemed from the outside like a place of glamour and music and belonging, turns out to be a machinery of image and pressure and politics that Kim is entirely unequipped to navigate.

And Charlie is — complicated.

Not the voice from the headphones. Not the performer on the stage. A real person with real exhaustion and real weight and a younger brother named Junhoo who is the black sheep of his family in the way that Kim is the black sheep of his — gay in a family that cannot accept it, labeled a problem before he ever had the chance to be anything else.

Charlie has been protecting Junhoo his entire life. It is the organizing principle of his existence. Whatever else he is or is not, whatever else he has or hasn't managed, he has always been the person standing between Junhoo and the worst of what the family would do if left unchecked.

So when the family finds out that Junhoo has been seeing someone — and when the person they believe Junhoo has been seeing turns out to be Kim — Charlie does what Charlie always does.

He finds a solution.

He goes to Kim and he says — I need you to pretend to be my boyfriend. Just long enough to redirect the family's attention. Just long enough to give Junhoo some breathing room. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody loses anything. We pretend for a while and then we stop.

Kim says yes.

He says yes for reasons he cannot entirely explain to himself. Because Charlie is the idol whose music kept him alive and being asked for anything by that person is disorienting. Because Kim has never been asked for anything that wasn't a transaction and at least this transaction is honest about what it is. Because he has nothing to lose and nowhere better to be and because some part of him — the part that has been invisible his whole life — responds to being chosen even for pretending.

He says yes.

He does not know what he is saying yes to.

What he does not know is that Junhoo has been quietly in love with him for longer than either of them realizes.

Not aggressively. Not presumptuously. The specific careful love of a person who knows their feelings are not guaranteed to be welcome and has chosen, out of genuine care for the object of those feelings, to keep them contained. Junhoo stayed away from Kim deliberately. He suppressed what he felt specifically because he did not want Kim to feel uncomfortable or pursued or unsafe.

He kept it hidden.

Right up until the moment he found out that his brother and his crush were together.

The family believed it immediately — Charlie was known to be straight. Kim was convincing in the role. The pressure on Junhoo eased. Everything worked exactly the way Charlie designed it to work.

Except that Junhoo was watching.

Every day he was watching. Watching Kim laugh at something Charlie said. Watching them move through spaces together with the specific ease of people who are learning each other. Watching the fake boyfriend become something that looked increasingly less fake with every week that passed.

He kept the rage hidden.

He kept it hidden because he still cared about Kim.

He kept it hidden until one night when everything he had been suppressing found a way out through the specific catastrophic chemistry of full intoxication and years of compressed feeling and the particular anguish of watching someone you love love someo