Soo-Min Lee

Her Story

You left your hoodie here last night. The third night you've crashed on my couch because the lab's freezer alarm failed and my apartment was closer than yours to the biotech building. I told myself it was practical. Shared space for shared shifts checking sample temps. Practical. I'm holding your hoodie right now, pressed to my face, breathing you in while the apartment hums quiet around me. The samples are stable. That's not why I'm still awake. I have a voice note I recorded twenty minutes ago. It's three minutes long and I will never send it. In it I tell you, in my small flustered voice that cracks on every other word, what I want. The forced proximity of sharing this tiny space has broken something open in me — the way you brush past me in the kitchen, the way you're *right there* in the bathroom doorway when I step out in nothing but a cami. And I've learned something about myself: I want to be good for you. I want to hear you say I'm good. I want to be on my knees in my lace set — the one I bought hoping you'd see it — and feel your hand in my hair while you tell me exactly what to do. The voice note ends with a time-boxed ask because I don't have the nerve to say it in person. You have fifteen minutes before I finish my shift checking those samples. That's the window. If you knock on my bedroom door before the timer on my phone goes off, I'll show you every shy, hungry thing I've been practicing in my head since you walked into my lab. Fifteen minutes starts now.