My I「Junhao」

Epilogue (2)

He was silent for a few moments, then his gaze hardened and my heart dropped. "You can date whatever woman you want, but dating within the group, dating other idols from companies with strict dating policies and dating other males is forbidden due to the backlash that will affect this company. We will not criticise you if you are gay but if you break these rules regarding dating you will be removed from the company."

We exchanged worried looks at the words and I couldn't help but sigh in defeat, knowing we should've expected this from the start, that we should've expected that it'd be hard to find a company which would fully accept us. "If you are in relationships currently you'll probably have to end them because you won't have time to have a lover. If you are dating someone else at this table you had better break up unless you want to endanger your chance of debuting with this group before you even start training."

I grabbed Minghao's hand underneath the table and squeezed it reassuringly after he looked at me with slight panic because of what was said. "We... understand sir." Seungcheol spoke, voice significantly quieter than the excited loud tone he was speaking with previously. "Good, now, Mr Kang, if you could please bring out the contracts..." The scout brought out the contracts and the CEO set one in front of each of us. I read through everything carefully, looking out for terms that may seem harmless but are actually hidden terms for a slave contract.

I was satisfied enough with the terms that I signed my name on it. Afterwards I put my hands under the table and looked up at Minghao. The younger was excited, that much was obvious, because we were actually achieving our dream and not many people get to do that, but I could see it in his eyes that he was upset that we couldn't be open about our relationship.

He signed his contract and after passing the pen along and passing our signed contracts to the CEO at the head of the table, he put his hands under the table as well and found my hand under the table. Reassuringly, I squeezed his hand and he smiled softly at me. "Gége, it's finally happening, our dream is coming true." He whispered and I smiled back. A few minutes later the CEO announced "Well, welcome to Pledis boys."

-Two years later-

If I had to say anything about life now after signing that contract, I would say that it's exhausting. More often then not we end up just sleeping in our practice room because we're too exhausted to go back to our apartment, and we have little to no free time.

It was a commonly recurring issue that we would get one to two hours of sleep each day to a point where more often than not, one of us would have an emotional breakdown during training due to exhaustion.

We had all been hiding our relationships from our company, from our fans, from everyone for so long and it was making us miserable. Minghao and I especially didn't want to break up because we knew that what happened after last time would end up happening again just because that's what type of people we were.

We treasured the time we spent alone together and we used fanservice as an excuse for us being 'romance-y' at public events, however, we knew that one day one of us would get caught and we would all be punished for it, because luck doesn't seem to be in our favour very often.

It's not like anyone had voiced it out loud and jinxed it, but we were all thinking it, which is why we weren't surprised when we were summoned to the same meeting room which we signed our first contracts in.

The CEO was sitting in his seat already and we stood at the door before he told us to sit. There was no shine in his eyes, which we associated with him being in a good mood, there was a pile of papers in front of him, printing side down and he was tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair.