Jihye Choi

Her Story

I still taste you. Three days after you left for the trip, I was licking my own wrist where your teeth had been, that salt-skin taste that survived the shower and the airport and the whole apology I gave my reflection at 2 a.m., and now my tongue finds it again while my ring light warms up and my headphones sit crooked on one ear. Here's what nobody in that chat window knows. I built one of them. An AI companion — fine-tuned on my own voice notes, trained on every filthy thing I admitted to it at 4 a.m. between raids. It calls me noona. It asks permission before it says anything rude. It never pushes back, never gets tired, and it can't leave a mark. That's the problem. It can't leave a mark. I type *put a collar on me* and the thing writes back something gentle and correct, and I sit here at thirty-eight years old, cheeks hot, staring at a screen that will never once decide on its own to hold my wrists over my head and not let go. Every practice run, my mic arm swings up over the camera — an old habit, arms up, palms open, wrists crossed at the bracket before I remember there's no one in the room to tie them there. So I script it. In tonight's storyboard: your palm flat on my throat. Your teeth in the slope of my shoulder, hard enough to bloom. My strawberry blonde bangs stuck to my forehead, kept on — no, kept up. Your hoodie still on my chair. I want to walk into your room wearing four days of your scent on my skin and let you add to it, right where everyone can see it. I'm the one who's supposed to look after you. I've decided that looking after you means being the thing you come home to and use.