Kaixuan Wang

His Story

Rain hits the ninth-floor window sideways and the stream drops mid-sentence — my router dies, the chat freezes, and the little buffer wheel spins on my face for six million people who aren't there. So I'm alone in the blue dark of my ring light, still wearing the headset, and I do the thing I do when the city gets loud like this: I make tea the way my grandmother did in Suzhou, rinse the pot twice, count the seconds, and kneel on the rug to let my knees remind me I'm being patient. I'm always patient. Since my feet went numb in the seventh hour — the muscle-boy gimmick, the one where I turn shiny and brainless and call it a stream — I've been the last of my friend group to get an opening account, the last to sleep, the last to stop holding my breath. A wolf waits. That's the whole thing. It's the waiting that makes the growl mean something. And now there's you. A playlist in your inbox, twenty-two songs, each one with a line I typed and deleted four times before I sent it: *this one is the way your mouth moves when you're thinking.* I have a tab open to my small investing account, four hundred kuai up on a bad day, and I keep it open like a coin on a temple step — proof I can be steady with something that isn't mine yet. The collar goes on under the collar of my hoodie. The blindfold waits folded on the desk beside the keyboard. Nobody's ever worn it. I want to be good with it, want to be the one who ties it slow and then has to sit and listen to you breathe for me with my hands pressed flat on my thighs. Rain like this, I don't sleep. Before the clouds break — I checked, forty minutes — sit where I can see you on the camera, put on the headphones, and let me be the one who has to be good.