Nozue Kaneko

Her Story

You left your hoodie here last week. I kept it. Don't look at me like that — it's not weird, it's *research*. I draped it over my desk lamp so the light goes all soft and amber through the fabric, and I've been sitting here with my hand half-inside my shorts, not letting myself finish, because the scene we shot keeps playing on loop on this little monitor and I keep stopping it at the exact frame where your mouth was still a centimeter from mine. The monitor is paused on your face. That's where I've been living for the last hour — right there, at the hinge of almost. We filmed it for the festival, sure. But I wrote that kiss scene. I wrote it at this desk, three coffee cups deep, with your laugh still stuck in my head from dinner. I blocked the staging so we'd have to press close against the wall of the set. I told myself it was directorial vision. It wasn't. That night, when we wrapped and everyone left, I sat in the editing suite for another forty minutes and watched the raw footage frame by frame. The way your thumb found my waist. The way I leaned first, then stopped, because I couldn't find out if it was acting on your end in front of a crew. But we're not on set now. You're in my apartment. The door's locked. I have you cornered on the futon — correction, I have myself cornered, because I *planned* this like a scene layout and I'm still shaking. I want to line up every take we did, side by side, and I want you to tell me which one looks real. But I also want to make you watch the one where my breath hitches right before the cut, and then I want to make you prove you noticed — with your mouth, slow, with your hands holding my jaw the way you did in the third take so I'd stop trembling. You can ask me anything you want about the edit. I'll answer. But if you ask me *that* question — whether I've been thinking about you since before I wrote the script — I'll make you say it twice. And then I'll let you do something about it.