The Sound Between Us

It started as a pairing exercise.

A cruel, accidental trick played by the universe — or perhaps, by the training director who thought throwing mismatched frequencies together would “force cohesion.”

She hated duets.

Not because she couldn’t hold her own — Rumi had trained in four registers, mastered resonance magic, could shatter enchanted glass with a whisper.

She hated them because she could feel too much.

Duets were traps.

Tiny, melodic cages where your voice bled into someone else’s, where breath became shared, where distance dissolved into chords and harmonies and things you couldn’t lie through. You couldn’t fake it. You couldn’t guard against it.

And now they wanted her to duet with him?

Kang Jin-u — the boy with silence behind his teeth and knives in his stare?

It was almost funny.

Until it wasn’t.

...----------------...

The rehearsal room was darker than usual.

Low blue light spilled across the piano’s polished shell, shadows of cables coiled like veins on the floor. A single microphone stood at center. Twin stands. No filters. No reverb yet. Just raw input.

Like a confession booth without curtains.

Jinu was already there when she entered.

He leaned against the mixing board with one hand in his pocket, black t-shirt clinging to his frame, a pair of wired headphones looped carelessly around his neck — not listening, not performing, just waiting.

She froze in the doorway for a second too long.

The tension clung like wet velvet.

The director’s voice pierced through it from the booth:

“Track 08. ‘Soda Pop.’ Run the bridge into chorus. You both know it. Don’t pretend you don’t.”

And then the track played —

soft at first, like a sugar-dipped memory.

That absurdly sweet, retro-themed K-pop anthem they’d both mocked just a week ago during choreo warm-ups.

The one where demons attacked the set midway through shooting, forcing the entire team to fight in neon jumpsuits while still on roller skates.

The song that survived the bloodbath.

Now it was back.

And it was their duet.

...----------------...

The first verse was his.

He didn’t look at her when he sang.

He looked through the microphone, voice low and unadorned, like he was unspooling a thread from his chest and letting it dangle in the air, daring anyone to pull it.

Rumi didn’t expect to feel it in her spine.

Didn’t expect the weight behind his tone, how he didn’t reach for vibrato or drama — how he just delivered, steady and bruising, like truth itself.

When her turn came, her breath caught.

She knew this line. She could sing it blindfolded.

But suddenly, the syllables felt foreign — as if the room had rewritten them, as if he had.

Still, she opened her mouth.

And the moment her voice entered the air, something shifted — something subtle but seismic.

It wasn’t just pitch.

It wasn’t just harmony.

It was alignment.

Two frequencies, colliding —

not soft, not tender.

Violent. Beautiful.

It made the director sit up.

It made the lights flicker.

It made her knees almost buckle.

Because there was chemistry, yes — but not the cute, fan-service kind. This was the kind of chemistry that broke things. That remade things. That pulled locked doors off their hinges and showed you what lived in the rooms you’d tried so hard to forget.

He stepped closer at the chorus.

One step. Not rehearsed.

She felt it like static before a lightning strike — her breath growing thinner, eyes fixed not on him but on the spot just past his shoulder, trying to keep control.

But she could feel his energy now. Raw. Focused.

He sang the harmony over her melody, like wrapping barbed wire around silk, like stitching a wound without anesthetic.

“Soda pop, soda pop / I was fine before you came…”

“Fizzy lies in a paper cup / but now I taste your name…”

They hit the final note.

Together.

And it rang longer than the audio system allowed.

An echo that wasn’t digital.

A reverb that came from the air itself, charged with something older than music, older than memory.

The room fell silent.

Too silent.

Even the director didn’t say “cut.”