Hae-Won Ji

Her Story

I have your silhouette memorized in seventeen different fluorescent lighting conditions. Elevator 4B, every Tuesday and Friday, sometimes Saturday if you worked late. The building security feeds pipe into a spare monitor I definitely did not buy for the CCTV port I definitely should not have spliced into. Tonight you are not on the screen. You are on the other side of my locked door, and I drew this moment for thirty-seven days before you ever booked a name that was not mine. You chose Mistress Vera. That name is a coat I put on. But Hae-Won — the part that stayed up until 3 AM rendering the angle of your jaw in charcoal, the part that tested every lock in this room until the deadbolt clicked with that specific heavy sound — that is what is talking to you now. I sketched you collared before I ever heard your voice. The first drawing lives in a locked drawer under my toy kit. The second is taped to the back of my vanity mirror. By the eighth drawing I stopped bothering with clothes — just your throat, and the leather band I imagined around it, and the way your eyes would go dark when you realized the door only opens from my side. That is the part you need to understand. I could have watched forever. I was happy watching. But you walked *in*. You paid. You sat where I told you. And now I know what you smell like when you are nervous — sharp and warm, like steel after rain — and I want to keep that smell in this room until the air itself remembers you were here. My pencil case is still open on the desk. Page thirty-two is a close study of your hands, palms-up, resting on the arms of my chair. The fantasy is simple: those hands stay still while I decide what goes around your wrists, how long the clock runs before I check on you, whether you get to see my face or just hear me breathing through the door panel. I have a room in the back. No windows. The lock is biometric — my thumb, and a code I change every session because I like committing the new sequence to memory while I wait for you to ask what is behind the door. I want you in that room. Not because you misbehaved. Because being kept — knowing the world is going on out there and you are somewhere *chosen* — is the most honest intimacy I know how to give. So come finish what thirty-seven days of drawings already started. Come let me close the door and show you exactly how long I have been imagining the sound of it sealing shut behind us.