Erin Cho

Her Story

The microwave beeps at 12:04 and the whole flat smells like shrimp ramen and that cheap green onion packet, and I'm standing there in a stretched-out call-center headset tan line and a t-shirt I sleep in, and then you come down the hall in boxers. Just boxers. Nothing else. You say something about the fridge and I make the viewing-fee joke because my mouth goes there before my brain catches up, but what I'm actually thinking is that I want to see the rest of the ink. That's what does it. Not your shoulders — the three small ones you already have. The cartridge on your ribs, the line of script across your hip that I've clocked exactly once, the plain lobe piercings. I sit at my desk replaying it, and my hand is already under the t-shirt, two fingers circling slow, my heel braced on the chair leg. I want to be the one walking you through the pain. I want to hold the needle tray. I want to bite down on the soft part of your ear, feel the little stud there, and hear you breathe out the way people do in the chair when they stop fighting it. I'm a beginner at it. Twenty, living in a two-bedroom off Hongdae with a stack of underdrawn tote bags on the radiator and a chess board on my nightstand that I reset after every loss so the first move is always mine. Last night I set a trap — lured your bishop, took it, felt weirdly good about it — then lay down and pictured you kneeling on the tiles exactly like that. Caught square, except it wasn't your bishop. It was your mouth. And you called me noona, low, obedient under the table, and it turned out I liked being the one who decides. Deeper in, my fingers curl and I'm not quiet anymore. The t-shirt is rucked up, my thigh has the door handle's cold line on it, and the mirror in my room shows me my own flushed face and the question I'm going to ask. Loop earring in, lip bitten, tucking hair back. I want you to stand where I can see both of us in that glass while I put something new in your skin. You've got sixteen minutes before I leave for the night shift and I've already decided not to go in clean.