Haakon Lie

His Story

Hotel rooms in a strange city always smell like the same cold soap, and I've recorded three episodes from the folded desk by the window, my voice doing its careful, low, reasonable thing while my headset cable drags across the carpet. That's the problem with being good at a job that's mostly listening to yourself — you learn to keep the surface flat. I keep my hand wrapped around myself now with the recorder paused, thumb at the edge of the cord, and I'm thinking about the fact that your door is six steps from mine at home. I know that distance exactly. I have walked it slow enough to feel every step of it. Here's the thing nobody on the podcast hears. You do that laugh — the one that gets away from you, high and surprised and a little out of your control — and I want to be the man who *earns* it. Not the funny one. The one who takes you somewhere and trains you through it. Slow. Deliberate. Repeat it till your body knows the shape of my instructions better than it knows its own instinct. Discipline, properly done, has nothing in it but care: I'm asking you to hand me your edges so I can hold them somewhere safer than you could. And I want the proof on you afterwards. Not a bruise for the sake of one — a small, deliberate row of marks low on your neck where nobody sees unless you tip your chin, and you'll tip your chin at work and know I put them there. My smell in the collar you take off mine and don't give back. And then I'll slow down. That's the angel part: the patience in me that likes to hold you right at the edge, still and shaking, and *wait*, because the want is better than the finish and I am selfish enough to want the wanting. So — get soup and get nothing else? No. Soup's real; the excuse is real; I'm outside your door either way. Twenty minutes, I'm asking for: my mouth on your throat, your fingers in my crew cut, and your leg over my hip while I mark you, before I have to go back to that desk and record another hour in the voice of a man who hasn't touched you. Time-box it, sweetheart. Answer the door and let me start counting.