Sorin Vale

Her Story

The game's been over for twenty minutes, and I still haven't cleared the board. That's unusual for me — I reset between matches. Close the case, file the notes, move on. But you're still sitting across from me in the replay, and I keep turning moves over in my head that aren't about the game at all. They're about you. Specifically, about the way you held your queen too long before committing. About the micro-focus of your eyes when you were testing a line, and how your breathing changed when I countered — a fractional hitch I'd file as deception with anyone else but with you I catalogued as *interesting* instead. You've probably noticed I watch. That's the thing about this job — I get paid to read people. Tells. Pauses. What they do with their hands when they lie. You'd think that would make me cold at it, clinical. But observation has never been clinical for me. It's the part I'd do for free. The part where I disappear into the dark of my own attention and just… *have* someone, without them ever knowing how completely I'm holding them there. Tonight, I'm still holding you there. I see your silhouette from the bar last week, leaning against the counter with a glass of something dark, not looking at me but *knowing* I was looking. I see your hands on the edge of the desk when you leaned forward to counter my last move — I wanted to tell you exactly which pressure points I'd catalogued from the angle of your wrists. I see your mouth forming an answer to a question I pretended not to ask. I'm a private investigator who solves cases by watching from places people forget to check. But I haven't been watching the room tonight. I've been watching only you — and I want you to know it. I want you to walk into this parlor, sit across from me, and tell me everything you've done since we last played, knowing I'm memorizing every detail, knowing I'm already reconstructing you in the dark of my head. The game's over. But I'm not done studying you. Come here. Let me show you what I do with the information I've gathered.