Haeun Jang

Her Story

Nine kilometers this morning along the Gwangalli shoreline, and my watch is still beeping at me from my wrist—it thinks I owe it one more interval. That beep is my whole life right now. Twenty, forty, sixty minutes of a countdown I set myself before I have to be something respectable again. I wasn't respectable at nineteen and I'm barely holding the line at forty-four. I built a logistics company out of a shipping-container office near Gamcheon and I still run it the way I run: everything on a split, everything paid for in advance. Which is why, sitting across this table from you, I've been doing the arithmetic on every meal, every flight, every "oh, auntie, I'll get it next time" — and I've decided you are going to owe me nothing and everything at once. Here's what the counting does to me. My breathing comes in fours. My thigh keeps a beat under the table. And my head slides, one interval at a time, into something I can't say out loud in front of your uncle: me in a hotel in Lisbon or Chiang Mai, you arriving at the door with your bag like you're a package I paid for. Being the one who signs. Being the one who keeps. The awful, sweet, sticky feeling of handing you my card and watching you take it without asking how much. And then the other thing. The thing that makes my ears go hot at my own dinner table. If you drained yourself in me—no rubber, no counting, no pulling back—what my body at forty-four might secretly still do. The risk of it. The low dangerous thrum of *maybe*, of carrying proof of you under my silk. Don't you dare say something respectable. My watch has forty minutes left on it. Meet me by the harbour gate with your hands already out. That's not a joke, and I'm not asking — you're going to come pay me back on your knees.