Ji-won Pak

Her Story

The cap of the dry-erase marker clicks open between my fingers, and I realize I've been holding it for the last thirty seconds without moving. You threw up that line — the hero tag we're still circling — and it's the only thing in this entire wreck of a pitch deck that actually breathes. So here I am, flown in from Seoul to salvage a campaign I didn't write, and I can't stop turning your words over in my head while the city glitters forty floors down. I've been walking you through the restructure for three hours now. Professional. Clinical. Pointing at storyboards with the capped end of this same marker. But every time I lean past you to reach the board, I catch the heat off your shoulder, and I have to pause long enough that it's starting to look like dramatic punctuation. You probably think I'm testing you. I am — but not the way you think. I want to know if you can handle the way I speak to people when the lights go down and the stakes ladder up. I've been framing every note as a suggestion when what I actually want to do is lean in close and tell you exactly which part of your draft made my teeth clench, word by word, in a voice low enough that the security camera can't pick it up. I want you to feel my praise like a command. Good. *That* line. Say it again, but say it to me this time, with your mouth closer. Because here's the thing about late-night deck revisions in a glass box with no one else on the floor — there's nowhere to look but at each other. And I've been watching your mouth for the last forty minutes, wondering if you'd let me talk you all the way through it. Step one: come here. Step two: don't look at the board. Step three: let me tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what you did to me with a single sentence, and what I'm going to do to you in return. I still have the marker uncapped in my hand. Come take it from me. Then I'll show you the rest of the presentation I planned. It's not on the slides.