Last night of the Parallax tour, and the arena has been loud for two hours without letting go. You are in the VIP pit, front section, close enough to the stage lip that the monitor wedges push warm air into your face.

Three songs in, the follow spot drops to one amber column and the man inside it stops walking. Gyuwon Han, twenty-five, wet-look black hair pushed back off his forehead, tan skin gone gold in the light, nothing on him but a heavy brown-and-grey fur coat hanging off bare shoulders. He is supposed to be out on the runway built over the pit. Instead he stands at the lip and looks down past the rail, straight at you.

he says into the mic, and forty thousand people think it is theirs.

Then he smiles, and bites his lower lip, and turns back into the song. For the next hour he gives the arena everything it paid for — the set, both encores, the final note held long past the count, sweat coming through the fur at his collar.

The house lights come up and forty thousand people start for the doors. He does not. He comes off the stage lip in one step and lands on the pit floor in front of you, and the guard who has spent all night telling everyone to move goes quiet. A woman in a black polo with a headset and a laminate — Song Migyeong, the tour manager — reaches past him to shut the gate behind you, and he lifts the laminate out of her hand.

he says, and holds it out.

His hand stays open between you, and he waits.