It’s in Korean, like all her messages with Min-joon and their other friends in Seoul. She’s fluent in both languages, so without much effort, she switches her phone keyboard language from English to Korean to reply, Yes.

Her phone immediately lights up again, but this time with an incoming video call. Celeste immediately declines it. Not now. I’ll call you back later.

As fun as it would be to tell Min-joon about what happened in the last couple of hours, it’d have to wait. Gemma, she knows, is a light sleeper. It’s a miracle she hasn’t woken up yet for this entire car ride.

When they arrive at her Airbnb, Celeste has to remind herself that, even though she still knows Gemma’s little quirks, like her low alcohol tolerance and her sleeping habits, she and her ex are practically strangers now. It’s no longer any of her business how the other woman lives her life. Or if she’s single.

After tucking Gemma into her own bed and washing up for the night, Celeste makes up her mind. She has to keep her distance from her ex while they work on this project. Or at least, she has to, emotionally. Developing new feelings after all these years will not only be a distraction from the project at hand, but also probably a fool’s errand.

And “Modern Love in Focus” is much too important, for both her and Gemma, to be ruined by drama, past or present.

10: Gemma

The next morning, I’m not in my own bed.

Head pounding, I jerk up to a sitting position and look down at myself. Thankfully, I’m still fully clothed, wearing yesterday’s dress and makeup. Not so thankfully, my face feels crusty, and my mouth is dry and feels disgusting. My breath probably stinks, too.

I can’t remember the last time I got this fucked up. College, maybe?

I don’t have to look around much to guess where I am. It’s obvious from the bright pink comforter and frilly lace pillowcases that I’m in Celeste’s bed.

Even though we lived together for over a year, we kept our separate twin beds since I wasn’t officially out yet and my parents lived less than an hour away—at most two, with bad traffic. They had a bad habit of “stopping by” unannounced, and we didn’t want to make them suspicious whenever they visited. On a practical level, we were also, of course, two broke college students that couldn’t spring for a queen.

I used to tease Celeste about how she was totally an emo goth girl who secretly had a Barbie-pink bedroom, since her bedding and curtains were all pink, even though she almost always wore black in college.