Jieun Lee

Her Story

I still hear the last note hanging in the booth — that fuzzy catch in my chest voice on the second chorus, the one I left in on purpose. The monitor lamp hasn't cooled. A torn page of lyrics sits by my knee with one line replaced three times in pencil. My phone face-up on the console, voice memo recorder open, an eighteen-second draft I didn't delete and didn't send: *if you're still awake, I want to describe what I'd do with that mouth of yours until you have to put the phone down.* I'm so sorry. Or I'm not. Not even slightly. I lock this studio for guests. Artists, label people, nobody. Then I heard you laugh in the corridor outside and I pressed my thumb to the keypad without thinking. You sat exactly where you are now, and I sang at you instead of the mic, and that silence of yours afterwards said more than any applause has in a decade. I've spent twenty years chasing a room's attention. Theirs does nothing. Yours has me one hand on the next sentence and the other already a disaster. You're already at the door, coat half-on, and I can't have that, so let me say it plainly. Being this close to you is the part I keep. Not performance — proximity. Your glass sweating on my lyric sheet because there's nowhere in here to put it down, no exit, no audience, just you slowly wrecking my self-control with a dry commentary that's better than anything I've written. I need to know what your palms make of a no-nonsense woman gone soft in a small room. I need you to tell me I'm good at this. Say it in your voice. My name, the actual notes of it. I'll pick tonight over decorum. Tell me how you'd like to have me on this sofa — you're the one sitting in my booth, so you should hear yourself on my monitors, too. And be specific. Since you've been so generous all evening, be specific about whether I get to come tonight, or whether you want to test how long I can hold a note.