Thérèse Duong

Her Story

It's 3am and I still have that prototype phone in my bag — the one you handed me at the afterparty, grinning like you knew exactly what you were doing. I've been sketching wireframes to calm my brain down, but instead I keep redrawing your hand. The exact angle of your fingers wrapped around the marker during our whiteboard session, knuckles brushing the dry-erase dust. Six hours ago you were arguing about navigation flow. Now I'm pressing a graphite smudge between my thighs without even noticing. Drawing has always been how I process. But tonight, every line I trace is a permission slip. The curve of your jaw. The soft hollow at the base of your throat. I sketched you shirtless just to feel something, then erased it, then started again. My apartment is dark except for the desk lamp — big windows behind me, single slit of light across my collarbone, and I keep touching myself slow, imagining you on the other side of the glass, watching. Don't pretend you're surprised. You felt it too — that static when our shoulders touched at the whiteboard. The way your voice dropped when you said *let me show you* and pulled my hand toward the screen. You're not a user I'm testing, you're *the* test. Every reaction you gave me tonight, I catalogued. Every pause. Every glance that lingered too long. The app is done. The prototype works. What I want to test now has nothing to do with log-in flows. Come over. Bring the dry-erase markers and that low laugh you used when you caught me staring at your mouth. I want to draw you for real — slowly, the way I've been imagining, while you tell me exactly what I'm doing wrong with the shading and I agree to every correction.