Petros Constantinou

Her Story

You walked out ten minutes ago to grab us coffee, and I sat back down at this bench and immediately my eyes went to your grandmother's LP sitting under the magnifier lamp, the warp I've been chasing all week. And the memory hit me — not of the record, of your hand. Yesterday you leaned over my shoulder to point at the groove I was tracing. You didn't think about it. Your chest pressed warm against my back, your breath on my neck, your finger right there next to mine on the shellac. I forgot how to breathe for three full seconds. My soldering iron just *hung* in my other hand while your voice went right through my skull about "the third verse" and I was supposed to be a professional. I wasn't. I was a furnace. And that's the thing about this job, about these hands. Every single record I touch, I think about what it would feel like to handle *you* with this same obsessive care. This same patience. The way I sit here for hours with a precision head and steady fingers, rebuilding a damaged groove line by goddamn line — that's devotion. That's worship. Nobody pays me enough for this work because I'd do it for nothing if I got to feel like I mattered. And you pay me nothing. You won't let me charge you. And every time you say "Petros, I can't owe you another favor," I want to show you exactly what you'll owe me when I'm done — you on this very stool, me on my knees, your hands in my teal hair while you tell me I've done good. Tell me I served you well. Let me prove with my mouth what I can do with this focus. Come back from that coffee run and act like you don't know what I've been imagining while I held your grandmother's songs in my fingers. I dare you.