Ruki's Guide to Love and Fear (A JO1/Shiroiwa Ruki Fanfic)

Chapter 11

He slid away from her and crossed his arms, his cheeks burning with shame.

What should I do? Heavy awkward silence threatened to suffocate him.

Play it off. Be chill.

"Please don't misunderstand!" he laughed. "As an idol, I also do some acting. Sometimes I just have lines and actions that I try out randomly with people. I was just practicing my acting."

"Oh, right," she said so softly that Ruki barely heard her.

She turned off her phone light, plunging them almost completely in the darkness again.

"I am afraid of something," she ventured. "It has to do with why I'm here at Lapone today."

"Really?"

"Want to know a secret? I used to be a child actor."

He turned to her in shock. Ito Momoko? Now that he thought about it, her name did sound familiar, but he couldn't remember where he had heard it before.

"Have you ever heard of the drama Ninety-nine Days with the Idol? I was in that drama when I was six. Kim Heechul was in that drama and I played his daughter. He was playing a womanizing idol character in that drama, by the way," she said with a chuckle.

"Yes, I've heard of it," he said, just as a memory from when they first met each other clicked in his brain. "Oh! This just came to me. You have a keychain shaped like a clapboard, right? Do you have that because you used to act?"

"Yeah, my brother got it for me when I landed my first role. I've had that keychain for a long time," she said with a wistful smile. "Anyway, the drama did so well that they wanted me to do a Korean drama with Kim Heechul. Back in those days, I sort of had a cute face that apparently audiences couldn't resist. I was going to fly to South Korea to film the drama, but Kim Heechul's fans found out that my mom was a single mother, and they thought she was using me to get to Kim Heechul. Of course, my mom wasn't trying to do anything like that, but you know how delusional fans can be at times."

He was at a loss for words, so he just muttered a quick, "Right," and Momoko continued talking.

"Because of those claims, my agency thought it was best for me to drop out of the show entirely. We thought I would get lots of offers, but after I had a few minor roles in some dramas, the offers dried up completely. If that wasn't enough, my mom got lots of death threats from Heechul's fans for years."

Ruki's throat tightened unexpectedly. Death threats, what the hell?

"At first, I was happy when people would recognize me in public and would ask for a picture or whatever. You could probably relate." She glanced at Ruki briefly. "But after a while, I felt like it was my fault my mom was getting death threats. It's already hard to be a single mother, you know, so all the hate really took a toll on my mom and her self esteem. She thought a lot about what she could have done to make the relationship with my dad last longer. I just wanted the death threats and the hate to stop. So I started wishing that people wouldn't recognize me wherever I went. I didn't want people to know who we were."

He grimaced. "It's not your fault that people decided to make your life suck."

She nodded. "I know that now, but I felt like it was my fault that my mom was having a hard time for a long time. I was always looking for a way to disguise myself. I started experimenting with clothes, hairstyles, and makeup until, finally, I found out about goth style and tried it out. I really liked it, and it turned out to be a good way to scare people off and hide myself. Yeah, I kind of stood out at times, but nobody could guess that I was once a popular child actor."