F
ans took to Twitter hours after Song Minchan Is A Bully, Part 2 was uploaded, berating Minchan for his bratty attitude. Debates sparked on whether or not the video clips were scripted, while others either posted directly on the bassist’s social media accounts or ranted among themselves in the fan forums.
Clearly, phase 1 of EG Project’s plan was working, and that was a sign that they needed to continue working on a follow-through. All night, Yihwan and Steven worked together to complete the arrangement to Minchan’s song—now christened Golden—and they were all in the studio now, recording a rough version of the song.
Are you conscious
Just how precious
You are, you are
Did they shatter you
Did they take it
Too far, too far
Like some of the band’s previous rock ballads, Golden started slow and relaxed. Yihwan let go of his Stratocaster in favor of the keyboards, providing the gentle rhythm that opened the song. Steven worked his magic on the percussions, creating a steady pulse that crawled stealthily in the background, building up until Minchan, now on lead guitar, brought on the chorus.
When you reach the verge of breaking down
Find me
I promise to be around
Get up; I'll be with you, don't surrender to the hate
Don't let them dictate, don't let them seal your fate
You're golden (You’re golden)
And it's about time you showed them
* * *
“I knew I was going to find you here.”
The timbre of that voice was enough to make Fi look up from her bowl of ramyun—deer in the headlights expression, noodles hanging from her lips—and almost choke. Luckily, there was a water dispenser near the door, and Gabriel was quick to grab a tin cup, fill it with water, and hand it over to Fi.
She took the cup and drank from it slowly, watching the PR manager pull a chair from a vacant table and sit across her. From his well-pressed blue button-down to his towering height, Gabriel looked all sorts of misplaced in this rickety hole in the wall.
“How, even?”
“I thought a lot about it,” Gabriel said, shrugging. “You showed me this place before, remember? When I was new at Amethyst...”
Fi was surprised he remembered, especially since they had only been here twice. The first time was when he got lost after a friendly game of street basketball and managed to wander into her neighborhood.
“Right. When you got lost around here.”
“I recognized you from work, so I thought to ask for directions. But you were walking so quickly...”
“So you just followed me around like a homeless puppy.”
“I had a feeling you’d take me in,” he blurted out and chuckled softly. Fi’s cheeks started feeling warm, and it was definitely not the ramyun. She stared into her bowl and went back to eating her meal, hoping to conceal her kilig.
Meanwhile, Gabriel scanned the restaurant with an amused smile on his face. Nothing about the place had changed, save for a few new idol posters here and there. The ahjumma running this joint seemed to be good at keeping up with current trends. The EG Project poster on the wall near the counter was from their most recent magazine feature.
“Anyway, you weren’t answering my calls. I was worried. Thought I’d give this place a shot, and here you are,” he told her, putting his arms on the table and covering almost half of it. “How are you doing?”
“I’m alive.”
“Filipina.”
“I’ll be all right. Just...maybe not today. Or tomorrow. Or the day after that.”
Fi placed her wooden chopsticks down beside her bowl of ramyun and let her gaze wander around the small space she and Gabriel now shared. It wasn’t a busy day; from where she was seated, she could only see one other occupied table. That left four more vacant.
She liked this place because it served cheap, tasty food, and it was conveniently near her apartment. Above all, the ahjumma running it reminded her of her mother: sweet and warm, if a bit naggy at times.
She couldn’t remember if she had told Gabriel all this, but he seemed to have a good recollection of this place anyway. Perhaps it was because of the food he had, whatever that was, when they were here last.
“I feel like this is my safe place, you know? I can have meals alone and not be treated like a loser,” Fi confessed with a resigned shrug. “Especially now that I feel like Cady Heron, and the entire Original fandom is my Regina George.”
Gabriel propped his elbow on the table, rested his chin in his palm and just stared at her.
“I’m sorry, Regina George is—”
“I know who Regina George is,” Gabriel cut her off, smirking. “I heard she does car commercials. In Japan.”
She laughed. He quickly went on full defensive mode, saying it was his first girlfriend who dragged him to the movies to see Mean Girls when it first came out.
“That you remember lines from the movie makes me assume you didn’t watch it only once.”
“My cousin asked me to buy her a DVD copy for her birthday. And then she asked me to stay and watch it with her friends during her slumber party—I was really only there as a guardian.”
Fi couldn’t hide her amusement. “Are you always this much of a pushover?”
“Depends on how much I like the person,” he replied with a smile that made Fi’s heart flutter so much, she found the need to divert her attention to the side dishes in front of her. There was kimchi, odeng, and caramelized baby potatoes. Some restaurants offered six or seven banchan, but Fi could hardly demand more when she only paid for a measly bowl of ramyun.
“Fi—I want you to know that we’re doing something to overrule the termination.”
She looked up at him again, wide-eyed. “Oh no, you don’t have to do that.”
“Why not? What they did was wrong. By law, they can’t just fire you like that!”
“Gabe, it’s... It’s just too much work. You have things to do, I have things to do—”
“Like what? You can’t seriously be thinking of coming here to mope every day.”
Fi shot Gabriel a look that usually shut him up, but he challenged her gaze instead, as though daring her to prove him wrong. Sighing, she picked up one of her chopsticks and started poking at the odeng, getting frustrated when she repeatedly failed to pick up a piece.
“What are you doing?”
“Heart surgery. Obviously,” she snapped, flicking the chopstick up in the air like a cheap magic wand. If Gabriel had been leaning any closer, she perhaps would have poked his eye.
He didn’t say anything and simply pulled his head back, eyes still trained on her.
“I now hereby declare I’m as useless as this chopstick.”
A frown lined Gabriel’s face as he watched her in solemn contemplation. Fi couldn’t help but think he now saw crisis whenever he looked at her.
“Don’t say that.” He took the wooden utensil from her hand and cast an apologetic glance at it, like she’d hurt its feelings. Gabriel then used it to retrieve a piece of odeng from the side-dish plate and gloated when he succeeded. “You’re just being impatient,” he said, insisting the chopstick is useful for poking and picking things up. All while shoving her food in his mouth.
“Really.”
“Mm-hmm,” Gabriel hummed, picking up one of the baby potatoes and pretending to feed it to her, only to pull it away at the last second so he could eat it instead.
“Gabe.”
“Fi…” He paused to properly chew his food. “You, of all people, are the farthest thing from being useless. There are just limitations to what you can do now because you’re alone. Or you feel like you are.”
He took her other chopstick. “Two together can accomplish more things. And faster,” he pointed out, picking up another baby potato to really feed it to her this time. She smiled at him before taking it in her mouth.
“You know what? There was this one time Minja noona rounded everyone up at the PR Department for drinks,” Gabriel narrated, moving the utensils idly in the air like some kind of university lecturer ready to point something out on the board. “I was still green then. Maybe three, four months in? And when everyone got past the tipsy point, one of the guys suggested we should play the chopstick game.”
“Oh no. Not the chopstick game.”
“Oh yes. The chopstick game. It was new to me, so I just went, ‘What the heck,’ and played along. Also I was very, very drunk and bordering on stupid,” he admitted, making her laugh.
Quickly, he snatched an unused paper napkin from the dispenser and cleaned the pair of chopsticks he was holding. Five seconds later, he was holding them through three fingers—under his index, over the middle, and under the ring finger again. A squeak came out of Fi when Gabriel slammed his hand on the table, the force of his index and ring fingers crushing the chopsticks against his middle finger. He groaned and shook the pieces off his hand.
“Jesus, you didn’t have to show me! I know how that game is played!”
He only laughed and eyed the bamboo container on the other table holding wrapped wooden chopsticks. Before Fi could figure out what he was thinking, Gabriel reached for the container and grabbed four pairs of chopsticks. He stuffed them between his fingers like the first time. “Do you think I can break all of this if I slam them hard enough?”
“I think you’ll break your fingers.”
“Exactly.”
Fi rolled her eyes and sighed.
Gabriel put the chopsticks back into the bamboo container and picked up the pair he broke, gazing at it sadly before locking gazes with her again.
“Do you know what I love about you, Fi? You’re a force all by yourself,” he told her, his earnest eyes boring into hers. Could anyone blame her if she got stuck on the word “love?”
Because she did, and there was that disconnect again between the time his lips uttered words and her ears were able to grasp them.
“... and I just don’t want to see you broken. At least not on your own.”