nina

⏔⏔⏔ ꒰ ᧔ෆ᧓ ꒱ ⏔⏔⏔

The meeting is scheduled for ten o'clock. By nine fifty-eight you are already seated in the conference room on the fourteenth floor with a paper cup of coffee going cold between your palms, watching the door.

You’re nervous.

Eight months ago, the other four members of Blossom terminated their contracts and walked out of this building with their personal items in paper bags. You watched them go from the window of this exact floor. The label had offered a restructured deal and they had declined it, collectively and without much deliberation, and then they had looked at you in the hallway outside the legal team's office with an expression you have spent eight months trying not to think about too precisely.

You did not leave with them. The label's restructured deal had your name on a separate clause, and the penalties attached to that clause were a number that made your vision go briefly white when you read it. So you stayed, and now you are a solo artist with eight months of rejected concept submissions and a debut that the label needs to happen before the end of the fiscal quarter.

The concept submissions are not bad. You know they are not bad. Sunshine, Sunshine has a key change in the bridge that your vocal coach called exciting, which is the most enthusiastic thing your vocal coach has said about anything in three years. The production team said it was charming.

Chansung, the label's head of A&R, is at the head of the table rearranging his papers. Your manager Jisoo is beside you reviewing something on her tablet. Two junior A&R staff sit at the far end of the table with their laptops open, speaking quietly to each other about something that stops the moment you glance at them.

Everyone in this room knows something you don't know yet. You can feel it in the particular quality of their helpfulness this morning, the way Chansung offered you coffee twice and then apologized for the cups being paper.

"He's particular about punctuality," Chansung says, to no one specifically.

"It's ten oh four," you say.

The door opens.

Keum Seongje is not what the industry photographs suggest. The photographs present him as angular and composed, all sharp jaw and expensive neutrals. In person he takes up more space than his frame should allow. He’s wearing a grey hoodie with the cuffs pushed up and glasses that cost more than your monthly vocal coaching sessions. He has a coffee cup from the place two blocks over, which means he stopped somewhere on the way here and did not hurry.

He sits down without greeting anyone. He opens his laptop and reads something on the screen. He does not apologize for the time.

Chansung clears his throat. "Seongje, thank you for making the trip. We're very glad to have you on board for this project. As I mentioned in the brief, we're looking at a solo debut for our artist here, building on the fanbase she established with Blossom, and we thought given your track record with image repositioning that you might have some interesting-“

"Play it," Seongje says.

Chansung stops mid-sentence. "Sorry?"

"The submission." He sets his phone face-down on the table. "Play it."

Chansung looks at you. You pull out your own phone, connect it to the room speaker, and press play. Sunshine, Sunshine fills the conference room. The opening is bright and synth-driven. Your vocal sits high in the mix, clean and controlled. The key change arrives at two minutes and twelve seconds, right on schedule.

Seongje listens with his elbow on the table and two fingers pressed against his mouth. He stares at a fixed point slightly above the speaker like the music is a document he is reading rather than something meant to be felt.

The track ends. Thirty-two seconds of silence follow it.

"No," he says.

Chansung shifts in his seat. "The key change in the bridge was something we were particularly excited about, the production team felt it added a real sense of-“

"It's not bad. It’s just not right,” Seongje says. He finally looks at you. "Sing something for me."

You blink. "The track is right there."

"I heard the track." He gestures vaguely at the speaker. "Sing something. Anything. Whatever you were singing this morning."

Your manager Jisoo makes a small sound beside you.

"I wasn't singing this morning," you say.

"Then yesterday. Whenever you last sang something because you wanted to, not because someone was recording it."

You think of the voice memo you recorded at two in the morning three weeks ago, sitting on your bathroom floor because the acoustics were good and you couldn't sleep and there was a melody circling your head that wouldn't resolve. Then you look at this room full of people and you sing four bars of Sunshine, Sunshine instead, a cappella, just to give him something to work with.

"Lower," he says.

"It's written for my range."

"I'm not asking about the song. Drop it an octave and do it again."

The melody transforms into something your chest has to work for, something that sits in the back of your throat rather than the front of it. Four bars. Twelve seconds, maybe.

Seongje is very still.

Then he picks up his pen, writes two words on the notepad in front of him, and turns it to face Chansung.

"What does it say?” you ask.

Neither of them answers immediately, which is its own answer.

"What does it say?" you repeat.

Chansung turns the notepad toward you.

Sexy concept.

The silence that follows is the loudest thing that has happened in this room all morning.

"No," you immediately refuse.

"Yes," Seongje says, already writing something else.

"That is not what we discussed. You can’t just-“

"Your submission was written for a group," Seongje says, without looking up. "Four other voices, a concept that only works as a unit. What I just heard from you in that octave has nothing to do with Blossom. That belongs to you."

"I can't pull off sexy." The words come out before you can arrange them better.

"I didn't ask if you could pull it off."

"Because you are not the one who has to."

"Chansung." He caps his pen and looks straight at you. "Play me her fancam from the Inkigayo performance last March."

Chansung pulls it up on his laptop and turns the screen. You know the one. You know every frame of it. You were in the center, the camera finding you every eight counts, and you were doing exactly what the choreographer told you to do, which was be bright and accessible and pleasing.

Seongje watches twelve seconds of it and stops the video.

"That part." He points at the frozen frame. "Right there. You dropped the smile for exactly two seconds because you were listening to the bass line change." He taps the screen. "That is not a cute concept face. You made that face because the music did something to you and you forgot to perform for a second."

Your throat tightens.

"Oh," says one of the junior A&R staff at the end of the table, very quietly, like something has clicked into place for him.

"Oh my god," says the other one, slightly louder.

Chansung is nodding the way he nods when he is already composing the press release in his head.

"It suits her perfectly," the first staff member says. "Why didn't we ever-“

"Because you were looking at what she was doing instead of what she was about to do.” Seongje picks up his coffee. “I will take the full project."

"I am in the room," you say.

"I know," he says.

I haven't agreed to anything." The words come out sharper than you intended but you can’t help it. This stranger showed up four minutes late and now he thinks he can dissect your entire career in one sentence. You have been doing this for five years. Your image has been carefully constructed and maintained through comeback after comeback. No producer who couldn’t even arrive on time should be able to unravel it this quickly.

The protest sits on your tongue ready to be spoken. Except the bass line change from the Inkigayo stage is still lodged somewhere in your chest like a physical object. The way your voice sounded in that lower octave has not stopped replaying in your head since you heard the recording. A terrible suspicion creeps in that he knows exactly what both of those things are doing to you right now, that he can see the curiosity you are trying to bury under professional skepticism.

Your gaze shifts to Chansung for backup or at least solidarity.

Chansung’s posture has relaxed. One hand rests on the table near the portfolio like he is already planning which photos to use for the concept shoot. The betrayal of it makes your jaw tighten.

"Fine," you say. The word tastes like defeat. "But I want approval rights on the final direction."

Seongje has already turned back to his notepad before you finish speaking. His pen moves across the page in quick efficient strokes. Notes get added to whatever framework he has been building this entire meeting.

"Sure," he says without looking up. The tone carries the easy agreement of someone who has no intention of honoring what they just promised, like he is humoring a child who thinks they have negotiating power.

Your fingers curl against your thigh under the table where no one can see.

────୨ৎ────

The second meeting is in the same conference room, which you are beginning to resent on principle.

Seongje arrives on time. The punctuality gives you nothing to be quietly annoyed about before things officially begin. He sets his laptop on the table and pulls a small portable drive from his jacket pocket. The drive slides across the table toward you.

"Reference tracks," he says. "Listen to all of them before you say anything."

You don’t even bother reaching for the drive. "Good morning to you too."

He opens his laptop without acknowledging the comment.

Chansung has developed a new habit of sitting precisely between the two of you like a human buffer. He clears his throat now and attempts to restore some semblance of professional courtesy. "Today we are narrowing down the creative direction. Seongje has prepared some references, and we thought it would be useful to-"

"I have references too," you say. Your own laptop opens and the screen turns toward Seongje. A mood board you spent four hours building last night fills the display. Clean lines and soft lighting create something that walks the border between the image you have and the image they want. It’s a version of the concept that does not require you to become someone unrecognizable. "This is what I think we could be working toward."

Seongje glances at it for approximately three seconds.

"No," he says.

"You looked at it for three seconds."

"I didn't need longer." He nods at the drive still sitting in front of you. "Listen to the references."

The drive gets picked up. You put it in your laptop and open the first file with more force than necessary.

The track is nothing like what you expected. Slow and low, it builds around a bass line that takes up more space than the melody does. The vocal sample sitting on top is not pretty in any conventional sense. The voice sounds like it has been somewhere and came back changed.

You close the file after ninety seconds.

"That is not my style," you say.

"Not yet," Seongje clarifies.

"Not ever. My fanbase is not going to follow me into whatever that is." The gesture you make toward the laptop encompasses the entire concept he seems to be building.

"Your fanbase followed Blossom. Blossom doesn't exist anymore. You are building a new fanbase. The old one is a bonus if it comes along, not a blueprint."

The junior A&R staff are very still at the end of the table. Nobody seems to be breathing.

"I have two hundred thousand people who have followed my career for five years," you huff, suddenly angry. "That’s the foundation of everything the label has invested in, and if we alienate them with a complete image overhaul then we’re gambling with the only one I have."

Seongje glances at Chansung. "She's not wrong about the risk."

You blink, surprised he even had the ability to agree with you.

"She's wrong about the solution," he continues. You sigh. You knew it was too good to be true.

His hands pull the laptop toward himself and open the second reference file. "The answer isn’t to stay inside the old image to keep the old audience. The answer is a transition that gives the existing audience somewhere to go."

He turns the screen toward you. A chart fills the display with streaming numbers across a three-year period. The artist whose name you recognize stares back from a thumbnail photo. "She had a cute concept for four years before doing a full pivot at twenty-three. She lost thirty percent of her casual listeners in the first month but gained them back within a quarter, plus the new audience on top. The music was good enough that people followed it."

"She isn’t me," you argue.

"Correct. Her voice is less interesting than yours."

The room goes quiet in a different way than it has before. The junior A&R staff exchange glances.

"You don't know my voice well enough to say that. You heard me sing for twelve seconds in this room last week." The compliment feels fake coming from him.

"Fourteen seconds," he says. "And yes, I do."

"That is exactly my point. You don’t know me. You walked in here with a decision already made based on fourteen seconds and a fancam.”

"Then what do you actually want?" He closes the laptop. His full attention lands on you and it carries an uncomfortable weight. "Not what's safe or what keeps the label happy. What do you want the music to do when someone hears it?"

"I want people to feel something," you say. The answer is true but also a lie at the same time.

He looks at you for a long moment while his expression remains unchanged. "That's not an answer. That's what everyone wants. Try again."

"I don't have a better answer for you right now." Your hands flatten against the table on either side of your laptop.

"Then we have a problem," he says as his coffee cup lifts to his mouth without him drinking from it yet. "I can't build a direction around an artist who doesn't know what she wants the music to be."

"I know what I want it to be. I want it to be..." The words trail off as you stop yourself mid-sentence. The mood board is still open on your laptop and your eyes drop to it. "I want it to feel like me."

"The mood board doesn't feel like you." He sets the cup down.

"You don't know what feels like me." The defensiveness in your voice has become obvious now. "What do you even want from me?"

Seongje leans back in his chair and the leather creaks under his weight. "For you to stop performing in the studio."

"I am a performer. That is literally what I do for a living." Your spine straightens in response.

"That’s it. You perform for the crowd, not for yourself," he corrects. "The music I'm building will not work if the person singing it is managing everyone else's reaction to her the whole time.”

“That’s a very easy thing to say to someone whose entire career was built on being likable," you scoff.

"I’m not asking you to change your identity. I am asking you to separate your music from it,” he continues. "The problem is that you think your music has to be your identity and that every song you release has to represent the totality of who you are as a person. The music is part of you, not all of you.”

You have no idea what to say to him or how to argue against something that makes this much sense. Every meeting with him goes like this. You walk in prepared for one conversation and he tilts the entire axis of it before you realize what is happening. The ground keeps shifting beneath you and you keep losing your footing.

His laptop opens and the sound of keys clicking fills the quiet as he types something. A few seconds pass before a soft chime indicates an email being sent.

"I just sent you the rest of the references," he says while his eyes stay on his screen. "Listen to all of them before our next session. Pay attention to how the music makes you feel.”

You pull out your phone once everyone leaves and open the email to find six audio files attached. The subject line reads simply: "Listen with headphones."

You download the first file.

────୨ৎ────

The references he sends are forty-three minutes of music you would never have found yourself.

You listen to all of them sitting cross-legged on your studio apartment floor with your laptop open and the lights off because somehow the dark makes it easier to hear things properly. Track after track, the same aesthetic running through all of them like a thread pulled tight. Low tempos, with negative space in the production where most music would fill in the gaps.

You listen to the whole thing twice. Then you sit in the dark for a while.

The problem is not that the music is bad. The problem, the one you cannot say out loud in a conference room, is that it makes sense. Not for the image you have built and maintained for five years or for the fanbase that knows your name because of synchronized choreography and matching pastel outfits, but for something inside you that you have carefully buried inside you when the label first told you to do a cute concept.

You open a new browser tab and sit there for a moment. Then you type: clubs in Mapo idols frequent.

It takes you twenty minutes to get ready. You tell yourself this is a reasonable and professional thing to do, gathering information, field-testing a concept before committing to it in a studio with Geum Seongje watching you through the glass. If you walk into a room dressed the way his references suggest and nobody looks at you, then you will have concrete evidence that the concept does not work. Concrete evidence is something even he cannot argue with.

The cab drops you outside at eleven-fifteen. Inside, the music is bass-heavy and continuous, and the lighting is dark enough that your eyes take a moment to adjust.

You find a spot at the bar and order something without tasting it.

This is the part where you did not think far enough ahead. In the version of this plan that existed in your apartment with the lights off, you walked in and either things happened or they didn't and you had your answer. You didn’t account for the specific loneliness of standing alone at a bar in a club at eleven-fifteen on a Wednesday, nursing a drink you don't want, performing casualness for an audience of nobody.

Blossom used to come to places like this together. All five of you in a corner booth, Jiyeon ordering for everyone, Haerin stealing fries from the platter, the particular noise of four other people who knew your face without the stage makeup on. You hadn’t thought about that in a while. You think about it now, standing here alone. You finish your drink and order another one.

The second drink is when he sits down.

He’s attractive in a generic, well-maintained way, wearing a shirt that costs money. He smiles at you with the confidence of someone who does not often hear no.

"You've been standing here alone for twenty minutes," he says, leaning slightly toward you to clear the music.

"I'm aware," you say.

"That seems like a waste." He flags the bartender. "Let me get you something."

"I have something." You hold up your glass.

"Then let me get you something better." His smile doesn't shift. "I feel like you could use the company."

You’re deciding how to handle this when a hand settles at the small of your back.

"She's good," says a voice beside your ear.

You go completely still.

Seongje is looking at the man on the stool with the mild, unhurried attention he gives everything, glasses catching the bar light, one hand still at your back and the other wrapped around what appears to be his own drink. He looks like he belongs here in a way, the complete opposite image of how out of place you feel.

The man on the stool reads the situation in about four seconds. His smile stays but the confidence behind it drains out. "My bad," he says, and picks up his drink and leaves.

Seongje's hand drops from your back and leaves the space where it was feeling suddenly cold.

You turn to look at him but he is already facing forward with his elbow on the bar. His attention focuses on the middle distance like none of the last thirty seconds happened.

"What are you doing here?" you say.

"Having a drink." He takes a sip of whatever he's drinking and the ice clinks against the glass.

"Here specifically."

"It's a bar. They have drinks here." His tone suggests this should be obvious. He turns his head and looks at you with an expression that differs from the conference room version of him. The club lighting does something to the sharp lines of his face and softens the edges just enough that he reads like a different person standing in the same body.

"Go home," he says.

"I was here first." Your grip tightens on your glass.

"I know." He looks at you for one more moment that lasts long enough for you to feel it in your sternum before he looks away again. "Go home. This place isn’t for you."

You set your glass down on the bar with more force than necessary. The sound of it hitting the wood makes the bartender glance over. "This place doesn't suit me? You picked a sexy concept for me."

"I know." He swirls the liquid in his glass and watches it move.

"Both those things can’t be true," you say slowly in the way you speak when you are trying very hard not to raise your voice.

"They are. You just don't understand how yet." His fingers tap once against his glass in a rhythm that matches the bass line bleeding through the speakers.

The laugh that comes out of you is not polite. Several people at the bar nearby glance over in your direction. Seongje closes two fingers lightly around your wrist. He pulls you away from the bar without any particular urgency but with clear purpose.

"What are you doing?" You pull back against his grip but he is already moving. "I’m not going anywhere with you."

"You're making a scene." He navigates through the crowd like he knows exactly where he is going.

"I’m whispering."

"You're whispering loudly." He steers you down a short corridor off the main floor before stopping at a door marked Private which he opens without knocking.

The room inside is small and dim, with a lounge arrangement that sits empty. The door closes behind you both and the bass from outside drops to a low thrum through the walls. The sudden quiet makes your ears ring.

"You brought me into a private room in a club." Your arms cross over your chest defensively.

"You were about to get loud." He leans against the wall like he has all the time in the world.

You point at him with one hand while the other stays wrapped around your elbow. "Pervert."

"You came here to prove you couldn't pull it off," he says, seeing right through your plan.

"I was trying to understand the concept," you argue.

"The concept isn't about being in a place like this," he says. "It's not a club concept. What I sent you, those references, did any of them feel like this?"

He gestures vaguely at the walls, the muffled thump of the music outside.

"No," you admit, quietly and with great reluctance.

"You were trying to test the wrong thing." He pushes off the wall. "You can't field-test this in a club. It doesn't live here."

"You are still a pervert for bringing me in here,” you turn to leave, because suddenly all of the exhaustion from the night hits you all at once.

"There was a bouncer twelve feet away the entire time."

"A pervert with backup," you say, and push open the door before he can respond.

The bass hits you immediately, full volume, and you walk back through the club and out the front door into the cold without looking back. The cab you call takes four minutes and you spend all four of them standing on the pavement in the black dress telling yourself the heat in your face is from the noise inside and not from anything else.

────୨ৎ────

Three more concept meetings happen in the following two weeks, each one shorter than the last. The direction is set. The aesthetic is what it is.

His studio is in Mapo, on the fourth floor of a building that looks like it should contain a dental practice or a mid-tier accounting firm. There is no label signage anywhere. The directory in the lobby lists the fourth floor as a private recording space with no company name attached, just a unit number, which tells you something about the kind of person who works here. His name is not on anything.

The door code he texts you the night before is eight digits. You stand in the hallway and type it in and feel, for no reason you can justify, like you are entering somewhere you were not entirely meant to find.

The studio is not what you pictured. There’s a long desk crowded with two monitors, an audio interface, and a keyboard controller pushed to the far edge to make room for a legal pad covered in handwriting you cannot read from the doorway. Cables are bundled and labeled with small pieces of tape. Three empty coffee cups are lined up along the windowsill. One of the monitors has a sticky note on the bezel that says fix the low end on 3 in what you assume is his handwriting.

Seongje is at the desk with his back to you, headphones around his neck, clicking through something on the left monitor. He does not turn around.

"Sit down," he says.

The only other chair in the room is pushed against the far wall. You pull it up to the desk and sit.

He finishes what he is doing, rolls his chair slightly to the right, and pulls up a project file on the right monitor. The waveforms are dense, layered, more tracks stacked than you expected for something still in the working phase. He has been in here building this for a while. You look at the file name at the top of the screen.

YN_titletrack_v9.

Version nine.

"Instrumental first," he says. "Don't say anything until it's done." He hits play.

The track comes through the studio monitors. It’s different from what you’ve been hearing his references through laptop speakers for the past two weeks. The sub-bass sits below your hearing and registers in your sternum instead, a low persistent pressure that you feel before you consciously process it as sound. The opening is sparse, the bass and a hi-hat pattern land slightly behind the beat in a way that makes your body want to lean forward into the rhythm.

Then the melody comes in. It’s softer than the instrumental suggests it should be, sitting in a middle register that has room and warmth to it. There’s a moment in the pre-chorus where the bass drops out entirely for two counts.

The chorus builds slowly. It deepens, adding texture in layers, the melody folding into a lower harmony that runs underneath it and pulls the whole thing somewhere more serious than it started.

The second verse is tighter than the first. He has compressed something in the arrangement, pulled the space in slightly, and the effect is the feeling of something closing around you. The bridge strips everything back to the bass and a single vocal line, unharmonized, and the nakedness of it after the layered chorus is the most affecting thing the track does. It is over in eight bars and when the final chorus comes back in you feel the loss of that space immediately.

The track ends on a single sustained note that fades.

"It's good." The admission requires no effort because it is simply and completely true, and dressing it up would be embarrassing for both of you. "It's very good."

Something in his posture settles. Not pride or satisfaction in the way you expected it would look on him but more like the quiet release of a tension he was not visibly carrying.

He pulls up a new document on the left monitor and turns it toward you. "This one’s still a working draft. Nothing is locked."

You lean forward. The title track is called Under Your Skin.

The first verse opens cleanly, the language restrained, almost domestic in its specificity.

You leave your things on my side of the room Like you're marking something Like you already know I don't mind, I don't mind That's the part I can't say out loud

You read it twice. It’s not explicit per say. Implication is more effective than statement, and the restraint of the first verse makes the turn in the pre-chorus land harder than it would have otherwise.

I've been good at keeping distance You make it look so easy to close it Come here, I said, come here

The repetition of come here sits in your chest the same way the bridge of the instrumental did, stripped and direct. You keep your face very still. The chorus arrives and the track stops being careful.

I want to get under your skin Find the parts you don't let anyone near Stay there I want to stay there Tell me where it hurts I'll learn every single one

The second verse deepens what the first established. The language is still not technically explicit but it has stopped pretending to be innocent, the domestic specificity of the opening replaced by something more physical.

You run warm, always warm I notice everything The way you breathe when you're trying not to show it I notice everything

The bridge has four lines.

Don't tell me to be careful Don't tell me to slow down You've been watching me the whole time We both know what this is

You finish reading and sit back in your chair and look at the ceiling for a moment.

"It's still good." You look back at the monitor. "It's also very."

"Very," he repeats, waiting.

You gesture at the screen. "You’ve written a song about sex."

He leans back in his chair. "The reading is up to the listener."

"Seongje." You point at the screen. "Explain to me how that is suggestive and not explicit."

He reads it again with the genuine focus of someone considering the question seriously. "It could be about emotional vulnerability."

"It’s obviously not."

"You're being a prude."

"I am being a professional." You sit up straighter. "I agreed to sexy. Not to whatever the bridge is doing."

He looks at you for a long moment. "Are you actually going to be able to sing this?"

"I can sing it."

"You look like you've never heard a song with a double meaning before." He tilts his head slightly. The studio lighting catches the edge of his glasses. "You're not seriously this sheltered. You've been in the industry for five years."

"Being in the industry for five years does not mean—"

"I'm just saying." He leans back in his chair. "You're acting like a virgin."

The word lands in the room and sits there. You open your mouth, unable to stop yourself from gaping at him.

"It was a joke," he scoffs, already turning back to the monitor. "Calm down."

"I know it was a joke."

"You're very red."

"It’s warm in here."

"The temperature is fine." He scrolls through the lyrics. "Look at the second verse, the meter is what I actually want your opinion on—"

"I'm not a virgin," you say.

The scrolling stops.

He turns his chair very slowly and looks at you. You avoid eye contact. The back of your neck is hot. You said it too fast and too loud, with the specific energy of someone who has proven the exact opposite of what they intended to prove. You know it, and he knows it.

"Okay," he talks to you in the same tone you would use with a toddler throwing a tantrum.

“The second verse,” you change the topic. “You wanted my opinion on the meter.”

He’s quiet for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice has lost its usual edges. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was a cheap joke.”

You weren’t expecting this. Three weeks of meetings have taught you to anticipate his deflections. You don’t know what to do with this plain acknowledgment. The lack of performance disarms you more than the apology itself.

“It’s fine,” you manage.

He accepts this with a small nod and turns back to the monitor. “The third line in the second verse runs long. Tell me if it feels natural to sing or if it needs cutting.”

You pull your chair closer to the screen and read the third line of the second verse.

You run warm, always warm

It sits cleanly in the melody in your head. The problem is not the meter. The problem is that the line means something different than it did sixty seconds ago, and Keum Seongje is eighteen inches away waiting for your professional opinion.

"It's fine," you say, in a perfectly level voice.

"Agreed," he nods and opens the next file.

────୨ৎ────

The break happens at a natural pause, him switching between project files and you reaching the limit of how long you can read suggestive lyrics with your face arranged into something professional. He gets up to deal with the coffee situation, which apparently involves a small machine on the shelf behind the desk that he operates with the quiet focus of someone who does this exact thing at the same time every day.

You roll your chair back and stretch your neck.

"I want to see the rest."

"Sure," he says, and sits back down.

He opens the second file and turns the monitor toward you.

The title is two words. Taste Test.

You read the title. You set your coffee cup down.

"That's just the title," he says.

You read the actual lyrics. You read them twice because the first time through you are not entirely certain you are parsing the Korean correctly, and the second time confirms that you are.

"I need a moment," you say.

You stand up and walk to the far side of the room and stand there with your hands on your hips facing the wall for approximately ten seconds. The wall has a small framed print on it, abstract, which you study with great attention while you locate your professionalism. Then you walk back and sit down.

"Next one," you say.

He opens the third file. Get Closer.

The opening line is deceptively simple. Four words, nothing technically explicit, but sitting inside the melody he has built for it in your head they land with a weight that is considerably more than the sum of their parts. You read the first verse without incident. You read the second verse. You get four lines into the bridge.

Don't keep the door between us You know I can hear you breathing Come here, just come here Stop pretending you don't want this too

You stand up. You make it to the door this time before you turn around. Seongje watches the entire thing with his elbow on the desk and his chin resting in his hand, expression unreadable.

You walk back. You sit down. "All of them," you say. "Just show me all of them at once."

He opens tracks four, five, and six in sequence and pushes the monitor toward you without a word.

Track four is called Running Hot and opens with two lines that make the back of your neck prickle immediately.

You run warm, I run warmer Come find out what that means

The chorus of track four does not bother with implication.

Track five is called After Hours and is structured as a conversation, call and response, the kind of song that requires two people to perform it.

Track six is called Stay and is the quietest thing in the folder, slower than the others.

You read all three without getting up, which you consider a genuine personal achievement, though by the end of track six you are sitting with your elbows on the desk and your face pressed into both palms.

The room is quiet. Down the hall, something from another studio moves through the walls at low volume.

"I'll edit them," Seongje says.

You lift your face. "What?"

"The other tracks. Pull the language back on a few of them." He is already opening the second file. "The title track is close to final but the rest have room to—"

"Don't."

He stops.

You look at track six still open on the screen. Stay is sitting there in plain text and the last two lines are still doing something to the inside of your chest that you are not going to examine right now. "These work. All of them. Don't water them down because I made a face."

He says nothing for a beat. Then, carefully: "I just want to make sure we're on the same page. Because two weeks ago-"

"I am aware of what I said two weeks ago." You pick up your coffee. "I am updating my position. People are allowed to do that."

He looks at you for one more moment, the corner of his mouth doing the thing you have started to recognize as the closest he gets to laughing, and then he turns back to his keyboard.

"Meter on the bridge of track two," he says. "It runs long."

You pull up Taste Test and read the bridge again. The bridge is still the bridge. You read it with professional detachment and only minimal damage to your composure. "Last four words. They're dead weight."

He makes the note.

"Track three, second verse, line five," you say. "Syllable count is off against the instrumental. You can hear it even when reading it cold."

He leans over and reads it, then pulls up the instrumental file and plays the section in question. Twelve seconds of music fills the room, the bass sitting in your chest the same way it did on the first listen. He stops it and makes a note. "Good catch."

"The call and response structure on track five," you say. "Is that intentional or a draft thing?"

"Intentional."

You look at the lyrics for After Hours on the screen. "That requires two voices. Are you planning a feature?"

"Something like that," he says, which is not an answer .

The session continues. Track four remains exactly as written. You read the chorus of Running Hot two more times over the course of the afternoon for purely professional reasons, and by the third time the initial heat in your face has downgraded to something that is almost, almost manageable.

Almost.

────୨ৎ────

The booth is smaller than it looks from the other side of the glass. You put the headphones on. Through the glass Seongje settles into his chair at the board, pulls the monitor toward him, and his voice comes through the cans a moment later, close and direct in a way that is slightly disorienting.

"Warm up first. Anything."

You run through your scales. Your voice sounds different here than it does in any rehearsal room you have worked in, the acoustic treatment catching every detail.

"Good," he says, when you finish. "Take it from the top of the first verse. Just the verse, don't push into the pre-chorus yet."

You find the melody in your head and come in on the count.

The problem is the bridge.

Specifically the third line of the bridge, which reads simply as "I've been waiting so long I've forgotten how to want anything else", and which you have now sung fourteen times across two hours with results that Seongje has described, in order, as: too bright, too controlled, too performed, too careful, too much like a ballad, too much like a jingle, and, most recently, too much like you are reading a grocery list.

"Again," he says, through the cans.

You breathe. You come in on the count.

Don't tell me to be careful Don't tell me to slow down I've been waiting so long I've forgotten how to want anything else We both know what this is

"Stop," he says.

"I know what the problem is,” You sigh, stopping him before he can start. “I don't know how to fix it."

"What does the line mean to you?" he asks.

"Wanting something for so long it becomes the whole of you," you answer. "Losing the ability to want anything else because the wanting has taken up all the available space."

"And have you ever wanted something like that?"

"That's not relevant," you say.

"It's the only relevant thing." He leans forward, elbows on the board. "The line requires a specific quality of longing. The particular feeling of something you have wanted for so long it has become structural, part of how you're built." He pauses. "If you haven't felt that you cannot fake it. The mic will hear the difference."

"I have felt longing before."

"Not like this," he says, and the certainty in it is not unkind but it is absolute. "This is not the longing of someone who is sad about missing something. This is the longing of someone who wants something long enough that the wanting has become its own kind of fever." He holds your gaze through the glass. "That is a very particular feeling and your voice does not have it yet."

The booth is very quiet.

"I don't have a reference point for it," your voice comes out quieter than you intended and more honest than you planned.

The studio is completely silent except for the low hum of the equipment.

You do not look up.

Through the glass you hear the subtle shift of his chair, the sound of him sitting back. He does not say anything for a long moment, long enough that you are constructing a full list of things he might say, all of them worse than the silence.

"That's the problem," he says finally. "I'm aware."

Another silence.

Then, in the same tone, unhurried and completely clinical: "I could give you that reference point."

Your first thought is that you misheard him. The headphones sometimes do something to consonants, compress them slightly. You have been in this booth for two hours and it’s possible that what he actually said was something logistical, something that your exhausted brain assembled incorrectly into the sentence you think you heard.

Your second thought is that you did not mishear him.

You look at him through the glass. His elbow is on the desk, face in its usual arrangement. He does not elaborate or follow it with anything that would tell you whether it is an offer or a producer solving a technical problem with the most direct available solution. The silence stretches.

You think about asking him to clarify. You construct the sentence in your head: what do you mean by that. Four words, professionally delivered, a reasonable request for clarification in a working context. You could say it. You should say it. You have the sentence fully assembled and ready.

He pushes his chair back, the casters rolling softly on the floor, and stands up. He doesn’t look at you as he walks around the console. He reaches for the door handle of the booth and you take a step back without meaning to, a purely physical response, your body making a decision slightly ahead of your brain.

The seal breaks with a soft thump of releasing pressure.

Suddenly he is in the booth with you. The small booth turns microscopic. He pulls the door closed behind him, and the world outside the glass ceases to matter.

He closes the distance in two deliberate steps. Now he’s standing in front of you, not touching, but the heat from his body is a tangible force. He looks down at you, his sharp eyes cataloging every micro-expression: the widening of your eyes, the quickening pulse in your throat, the way your fingers curl uselessly against the foam panel.

“You’re shaking,” he observes. His voice is lower here, without the mediation of the headphones.

“I’m not.”

“You are. Here.” He lifts a hand, fingertips stopping a centimeter from your throat. “And your breathing is all fucked up. You’re holding your breath, then taking these shallow little sips of air. You can’t sing like that.”

“I know how to breathe,” you whisper. The protest is pathetic.

“Do you?” He finally touches you. Just his index finger, under your chin, tilting your face up. The contact is electric, a jolt that travels straight down your spine. His skin is warm. “You know technique. You don’t know feeling. It’s a physical problem. So we solve it physically.”

His other hand comes up, palm flat against the panel beside your head, caging you in. You are surrounded by him.

“What are you doing?” The question is airless.

“Giving you a reference point.” His thumb strokes the corner of your mouth, a slow, deliberate pass. You do your best to resist leaning into the touch. “You said you lacked the experience. I’m providing the experience. Consider it vocal coaching, free of charge.”

He leans in. His mouth hovers near yours, sharing the same frantic air you’re exhaling. You’ve been kissed before, chaste, staged things for cameras or awkward, fumbling attempts in darkened vans. This is nothing like that.

“Have you ever been touched?” he asks, voice a rough murmur against your lips. You can’t speak. You shake your head, a tiny, shameful movement.

“Ever had a man’s hands on you? Here?” His thumb leaves your mouth and drifts down, tracing the column of your throat, over the frantic jump of your pulse, down to the neckline of your sweater. He hooks a finger in the fabric. “Or here?” His palm settles, heavy and warm, over the swell of your breast through the thick wool. You jerk as if scalded, a full-body flinch that he absorbs without moving.

“Fuck,” he breathes, and for the first time, the clinical edge slips, replaced by something darker, more intrigued. “You really are completely untouched.”

The humiliation is a hot wave. You squeeze your eyes shut.

“Don’t. Look at me.” He commands it. Your eyes fly open. “This isn’t something to be ashamed of. It just means every sensation is new. That’s what I need from you in there.” He nods toward the microphone. “That raw, unfiltered signal.”

His hand on your breast kneads once, slowly, and a shocked, thin sound escapes you. Your nipple tightens instantly under the layers of fabric. The sensation is utterly foreign, a line of pleasure that draws your belly tight.

“See?” He watches your face like a scientist. “That’s a physical response. You’re not supposed to think about it. Your body knows things your brain hasn’t caught up to yet.”

He drops his hand from your breast, and you almost whimper at the loss of contact, a reaction that horrifies you. But he’s not finished. His hands go to the hem of your oversized sweater. You grab his wrists, panic flaring.

“Wait—”

“Do you want to fix the bridge or not?” The question is brutal in its simplicity. It’s not about this. It’s about the song. It’s always about the song.

Your fingers loosen. You let your hands fall to your sides, clenched into helpless fists.

He pulls the sweater up and over your head in one smooth motion. The cool studio air hits your skin, and you cross your arms over your simple cotton bra.

“Stop hiding,” he says, and his hands wrap around your wrists, pulling your arms down to your sides. He bends his head, and his mouth finds the skin where your neck meets your shoulder. He bites.

The pain melts into a deep, throbbing heat that pools low in your abdomen. You feel yourself growing wet, a desperate betrayal between your legs.

“You like that,” he says against your skin. One of his hands releases your wrist and slides down your side, over the waistband of your jeans, to cup you between your legs. You buck against his hand, a shudder wracking your whole frame. Even through the denim, the pressure is intense and overwhelming.

“So sensitive,” he mutters. His fingers rub a slow, firm circle over the core of you. The friction is maddening. Your hips jerk, seeking more, and a ragged moan is torn from your throat. “There it is. That’s the sound. That’s the fucking sound I need on the track.”

He unbuttons your jeans. The zipper’s rasp is obscenely loud. He shoves the fabric down over your hips, just enough. His fingers slip beneath the edge of your plain cotton panties, and then he’s touching you, skin to skin.

You gasp, your head thudding back against the panel. His fingers are direct, exploring without ceremony. They slide through the slick heat he’s found, parting you, finding the tight, clenching entrance of your virgin body.

“Jesus,” he breathes, the clinical detachment faltering for a split second. His forehead rests against yours. “You're dripping wet.”

His thumb leaves your entrance, shifts upward, and finds the swollen, desperate knot of your clit. Your knees actually buckle. Only his body and the wall keep you upright.

“There,” he says, his voice rough in your ear. He begins to move his thumb in slow, deliberate circles. The pressure is perfect. “This is the part they don’t put in the songs. This specific, fucking needy ache.”

You are unspooling. Your hips are moving on their own, a frantic rocking against his hand, chasing the sensation. You’re making noises you’ve never heard before, guttural, hungry little whimpers that echo in the dead air of the booth.

“That’s it,” he coaxes, a dark, approving whisper. “Give me the real sound.”

The pleasure builds in a terrifying, glorious wave. Your muscles clench, breath coming in ragged gasps. The world dissolves into a blur of sensation: the scent of his skin and the perfect rhythm of his thumb. You are so close to something, teetering on the edge of a cliff you didn’t know existed. Your body is tensing, bowing, every cell straining towards a shattering release.

“Please,” you hear yourself beg, the word ripped from somewhere primal. “Oh, God, please…”

You’re right there. The wave is cresting, about to break.

He pulls his hand away.

The loss is so violent and abrupt, it’s a physical shock. A cry of raw protest tears from your throat. Your body convulses, empty and furious. The promised release snatched away leaves you throbbing and desperate, obscenely unfinished. You slump against the wall, trembling violently, humiliation and need warring in the pit of your stomach.

Seongje brings his wet fingers to his mouth and tastes them, his gaze locked on yours.

“Now,” he says, his voice low and graveled with a tension that wasn’t there before. “You know what wanting feels like.”

He steps back, giving a single, devastating once-over your heaving chest and the ruined look in your eyes. “Now let’s sing the bridge.”

────୨ৎ────

The month happens the way most significant things happen, gradually and then all at once, the individual sessions blurring into a continuous thing that you stop being able to separate into distinct memories somewhere around the third week.

What you can reconstruct, if you try: the first time you stayed past midnight because the bridge of track three was not sitting right in the mix and leaving felt wrong. The takeout containers that started appearing on the windowsill beside the coffee cups, a permanent installation, Seongje ordering without asking what you wanted after the second week because he had already catalogued your preferences. The studio couch, which is narrow and not particularly comfortable, on which you fell asleep twice and woke to find a jacket over you that was not yours.

The almost-moments are harder to reconstruct because almost-moments require identifying where they begin and end, and in this studio, in this month, they did not have clear edges. They accumulated instead, layering over each other the way tracks layer in the mix, until the texture of being in a room with Keum Seongje became something you had to consciously manage.

You did not name any of it. Neither did he. The work was always there to return to, and returning to the work was easier than examining what was accumulating in the space around it.

The lap situation has a clear origin, which is that the studio's listening setup is built for one person. There’s only one chair at the board and one set of monitors positioned at ear height for whoever is sitting in that chair, the sweet spot in the room calibrated to a single point in space. When Seongje plays back a finished section he sits at the board and listens from that point. The sound is exactly what he built it to be. When you stand beside him to listen, the perspective shifts enough that the mix loses something. The difference matters when you are trying to evaluate a finished take.

You stood for three sessions before your back made the decision for you.

The first time you sat on the edge of his chair he moved without comment to give you room, which somehow became you sitting properly on his lap and him with an arm loosely around your waist to keep you both on the chair.

It’s simply how you listen to the playbacks now, your back against his chest, his chin occasionally dropping to your shoulder when he is focused on something in the mix, the weight of his arm across your lap a thing you have stopped noticing the way you stop noticing.

That’s not entirely true. You haven’t stopped noticing. You have simply developed a working arrangement with the noticing, a way of letting it exist alongside the professional purpose of being in the room without letting it consume the professional purpose of being in the room.

It is an imperfect arrangement.

────୨ৎ────

The finished album takes six weeks from the first vocal session to the final master. On the last night he sends the final files to the label and then opens them again in the studio.

You climb into his lap. He moves his arm to accommodate you without looking away from the monitor. He pulls up the first track.

Under Your Skin fills the studio through the monitors and it is different from every previous listen, different from the rough mixes and the working drafts and the late-night playbacks where you were still fixing things. It is done. The decisions are made and locked. The version of you that is in this track is permanent now.

Seongje's arm is across your lap. You can feel his breathing against your back, slow and even, the breathing of someone giving the music his complete attention.

The pre-chorus arrives. You remember the fourteen takes of the bridge you two went through. The chorus opens up the way it always does, the production expanding outward, and your voice is doing what he built it to do.

His chin drops to your shoulder, the way it does when he is listening to something specific in the mix. You feel rather than hear the small sound he makes in the back of his throat.

"It's done," he says.

By track four you have stopped looking at the monitor. You listen to your own voice do things that six weeks ago you didn’t know your voice could do.

Seongje shifts slightly behind you. His chin lifts from your shoulder. You feel him turn his head and you are fairly certain he’s looking at the side of your face rather than the monitor, but you don’t turn to confirm this.

Track five begins and you are not prepared for it, which should not be possible given that you already recorded it. After Hours in its final form is the most intimate thing you have ever heard your own voice do.

You remember recording the pre-chorus. You remember the specific quality of Seongje's silence through the glass after the first clean take, the way he sat very still at the board for a moment before reaching for the talkback button. You remember him saying, simply, that's the one, and the flatness of his voice when he said it.

The chorus arrives and it is the most explicit thing on the album, the language finally abandoning the restraint that the other tracks maintained, direct in a way that made you stand very still in the booth the first time you read it and very still again now, listening to your own voice deliver it with a conviction that still surprises you.

Tell me what you want Don't dress it up, don't make it pretty I want to hear you say it All of it Tell me what you want from me tonight I can take it Tell me

The track ends without a resolution, the two channels falling silent at different times, the right channel a half beat after the left, like one person leaving a room before the other has finished speaking.

You look at the monitor. The waveform for track five is complete, flat line at the end, the album continuing to track six automatically. You reach forward and stop it.

"There's no feature," you say.

"No," he says.

"You built the production around two voices." You look at the waveform. "There's a space in it. You built a space for another voice and you never filled it."

"I remember. I’m taking it off the album," he says.

You turn your head to look at him, which requires some maneuvering given the current arrangement, but you manage it. His face is its usual face, attentive and composed.

"What? Why?" you’re more upset than you thought you’d be.

"It doesn't fit the sequencing."

"It fits the sequencing perfectly. You built the sequencing around it. Track four into track five into track six is the emotional arc of the whole second half of the album. You told me that yourself."

"The arc works without it."

"Seongje." You look at him steadily. "We spent four sessions on that track. The pre-chorus alone took two hours. Whatever your reason is, it is the best thing on the album and pulling it makes the record weaker. You know that."

"The record is strong without it."

"Who were you going to feature?”

"It doesn't matter."

"It clearly matters."

"The track is coming off," his voice has the finality he uses to end conversations, the tone that in the first weeks of the project made you feel like a door being closed. You know it better now. You know it is not always a door being closed. Sometimes it is a person standing very still in front of something they do not want looked at directly.

"It's my call," he insists. "I produced it."

"Release it as a solo track," you fight back. "No feature. Reformat the production and close the space in the mix, it works as a single voice. It's actually more interesting that way. You know it's more interesting that way."

The quiet that follows is different from the other quiets in this studio. It has heat in it. Seongje stands up.

"You want to talk about what's actually happening," he says, and his voice is low and even, "or do you want to keep talking about the track."

"Close the space in the mix," your voice is steady, which is an achievement given the current circumstances. "Release it as a solo track. If you pull it, I’ll go to Chansung."

The mention of the CEO’s name lands like a thrown glass. His eyes flash, a crack in the composed facade. “You’d really run to him?”

“To release my best work? Yes.” Your voice doesn’t waver. “It’s my name on the album. My career.”

“Your career.” He repeats the words like they’re a joke in poor taste. The space between you evaporates. He closes it in two swift steps, his hands coming up to frame your face, his grip not painful but inescapable. “You think this is about your career?”

His mouth crashes down on yours.

He bites your lower lip, sucks it into his mouth, and you gasp against him. Your hands fly up, clutching at the front of his shirt, the fine cotton twisting in your fists. He breaks it as suddenly as he began, breathing harshly, his forehead pressed to yours.

“It’s a song,” you pant, your own breath coming in short, sharp bursts.

“It’s our song.” He spits the words. “That gasp in the bridge? At 2:47? That’s the sound you made when I had my fingers inside you. That’s mine.” His thumbs dig into your jawline. “You want to release that? You want the whole world to hear exactly how wet you got for me in that booth? To play it on the radio while they drive to work?”

Heat floods your cheeks, but a different heat coils low in your belly. “They won’t know.”

“I’ll know.” He shakes you, just once. “Every time I hear it, I’ll see you against that wall. I’ll remember how you shook. You want to let strangers get off to the sound of you coming apart?”

“Stop it.”

“Or what?” His voice drops to a seething whisper. “You’ll run to Chansung and tell him what, exactly? That your producer won’t let you release the song he fucked the performance out of you for? You think that helps your ‘sweet member’ image?”

The slut-shaming is crude, effective. It reduces the raw, terrifying intimacy of those sessions to something cheap and dirty. It makes you feel cheap. And yet, your body betrays you, a treacherous pulse throbbing between your legs. He sees it. He always sees it.

“You’re a fucking hypocrite,” he growls. “You cling to that demure little act, but you begged for it in that booth. You came against my hand like a starved thing. Now you want to package that and sell it.”

“That’s not what it is!”

“It’s exactly what it is.” He releases your face, his hands sliding down to your waist, yanking you hard against him. You feel the rigid proof of his anger straining against his slacks.

He grinds himself against you. A ragged moan escapes you, humiliation and arousal twisting together into one inseparable knot. Your head falls back, and his mouth finds your throat.

His teeth sink into the soft skin beneath your jaw, a sharp claim that draws a gasp from your lungs. You push at his chest, but the motion was weak, your body arching into the brutality of his mouth instead of away from it.

“You’re turning me into one of them,” you spat, the words trembling. “You wanted this. A marketable slut.”

He released your throat with a wet sound, leaning back to look at you. His eyes held a weary, cynical amusement.

“Maybe the concept just needed the right material.” He ground himself against you again, the hard line of his erection a blunt demand through the fabric. “We haven’t even fucked yet, Y/N, but you’re fine with the whole country listening to you sound like a desperate little thing begging for it.”

You shoved him, hard enough this time that he took a single step back, his hands falling from your waist. The space between you crackled with violent, unsaid things.

“I’m not desperate,” you said, but it sounded thin.

“Aren’t you?” He laughed, a short, harsh bark.

Your calves hit the edge of the couch and you collapsed onto it, looking up at him as he loomed over you. He undid his belt with a sharp, metallic rip. He pushed your skirt up your thighs, hands rough and efficient.

His fingers hooked into the sides of your plain cotton panties and tore them down, the fragile material yielding with a soft sigh. The cold air of the studio kissed your exposed skin, making you flinch. You were spread open before him, utterly revealed, and the clinical glare of the desk lamp left nothing to the imagination.

“See?” he said, his voice low. “You’re dripping. For a man who’s done nothing but use you for a song. That’s not desperate?”

You had no answer. Your body was a traitor, slick and throbbing, clenching around nothing.

He watched you, his eyes dark and unreadable, before lowering himself to his knees on the floor between your spread legs. You tried to close your thighs, a last instinct of modesty, but his hands clamped on your knees, holding you open.

“Don’t,” he said, the word flat. “This is what you’re selling, remember? Let’s see the product.”

He leaned forward, his breath hot against your inner thigh. So perfect and untouched,” he murmured, a mockery of wonder.

One hand left your knee. You heard the rustle of his slacks, the tear of a foil packet. You squeezed your eyes shut.

“Look at me.” The command was absolute.

You opened your eyes. He was sheathing himself, his expression focused, almost bored. The sight of him sent a jolt of pure animal fear through your veins. It was too much. You were too small.

“I can’t,” you whispered.

“You can.” He moved closer, the head of his cock pressing bluntly against your entrance. The pressure was immense, a fullness that promised to split you open. You cried out, a sharp sound of protest, and your hands flew to his wrists, nails digging into his skin.

He stilled, but didn’t retreat. “Relax.”

“It won’t fit,” you gasped, panic clawing up your throat.

“It will.” He shifted, removing himself, and you felt a dizzying mix of relief and shameful loss. He spat roughly into his palm, the crude sound echoing, and brought his wet fingers back to you.

One finger pushed inside you, deeper than before, a slow, relentless invasion. Your body resisted, clenching tightly around the intrusion, a sharp burn accompanying the stretch. He swore under his breath. “So fucking tight.”

He began to move his finger, a slow in-and-out. The burn began to soften, your body reluctantly yielding, betraying you with a fresh slickness.

“See?” he said, his voice low. “Your body knows what to do. It’s just your brain that’s scared.”

He added a second finger. The stretch was intense, a burning pressure that made you gasp and arch off the couch. He scissored them inside you, stretching the tender, virgin flesh.

“That’s it,” he coaxed darkly. “Take it. Just like you took my direction in the booth. Open up.”

He crooked his fingers, searching, and found a spot that made you jolt. A shocked, sharp sound was punched from your lungs. He pressed it again, circling it, and your hips gave a helpless, involuntary jerk. A broken sob escaped you.

“There,” he breathed, a hint of triumph in his voice. He worked you open, his fingers pistoning with a ruthless rhythm, stretching you until the initial burn faded into a hot, slippery ache. Your cries softened into moans.

The sound you made when he withdrew his fingers was a wet, obscene gasp in the quiet room. Your body clenched around nothing, a reflexive protest against the sudden emptiness. Your mind was a storm of shame and want, the sharp bite of pain from the stretching already softening into a deep, throbbing ache. He watched you, his eyes tracing the glistening evidence of your arousal on his fingers before he wiped them casually on the leg of his slacks.

“Up,” he stepped back, giving you space to rise on trembling legs. Your skirt fell back down, a flimsy veil over your utter exposure. The torn cotton of your panties lay on the floor near the couch, a stark white flag of surrender. You couldn’t look at them.

He was already moving, his back to you as he walked around the desk. You watched his hands, those same hands that had just been inside you, as they reached for a piece of equipment.

It was a microphone. A sturdy, professional condenser model on a short stand, one of several he kept nearby for when a melody or a lyric struck and couldn’t wait for the booth. He placed it carefully on the cleared edge of the desk, adjusting the angle with a precise twist. The small red power light winked on.

He looked at you over the expanse of black glass and scattered papers. “Come here.”

Your feet carried you forward on autopilot. You stopped in front of the desk, the cold edge pressing into your thighs.

“Turn around,” he said. “Bend over. Put your hands flat on the glass.”

You turned, facing away from him, toward the darkened window that reflected a ghostly, fractured version of the room. You saw the lamp, the couch, the torn underwear on the floor. You saw your own wide, dark eyes in the glass. You leaned forward, the position forcing your hips back, your spine into a deep curve. The cool, smooth surface of the desk met your palms. Your cheek pressed against it a moment later. The scent of lemon polish and old dust filled your nose.

One hand settled heavily on the small of your back, pinning you in place. The other gripped your hip, his fingers digging into the bone.

The blunt, thick head of his cock nudged against your entrance, still slick from his fingers and your own arousal. You tensed, every muscle locking.

“Don’t,” he warned, his breath hot against your ear. “You’re ready. Take it.”

He buried himself deep inside you, letting you feel every inch of him, letting your body convulse around the sudden, shocking intrusion. Your cry echoed off the hard surfaces of the office, decaying into a series of ragged, wet sobs.

“Fuck,” he groaned into your hair, the word vibrating through his chest and into your back. “You’re so fucking tight.”

He pulled back almost all the way, the drag a new, shocking friction, and slammed back in. The force of it drove you forward an inch on the desk. His hips slammed against your ass with a wet, meaty sound that was obscenely audible over both your breathing.

He was hitting something deep inside, a place his fingers had only teased. A broken, gasping moan fell from your lips.

“That’s it,” he snarled, his voice rough with exertion. “Let me hear it.”

And you did. You were so, so loud. Every slam of his body into yours punched another sound out of you, a sharp gasp, a choked sob, a high, keening wail you didn’t recognize as your own. You were crying, tears smearing the glass under your cheek, but you were also pressing back against him, meeting his thrusts with a desperation that shamed you.

He shifted his angle slightly, and on the next downward drive, he struck a place that made your vision whiten. A shattered, screaming cry ripped from your throat, echoing wildly in the room.

His hand left your hip. You heard a faint click. Then his fingers were in your hair, fisting painfully, yanking your head up and back. He forced you to look into the dark window at your own reflection.

“Look at you,” he panted, never breaking his rhythm. “Look at what you are. Not the sweet little idol. This. A messy, noisy, desperate little fuck.”

You wanted to deny them, but your body was proof. You were clenching around him, milking him. The coil in your belly was winding to a breaking point, fueled by the overwhelming friction and his degrading praise.

“You’re gonna come,” he stated, as if reading the tremors building in your thighs. “Come on my cock. Let the whole building hear you.”

He reached around your hip, his thumb finding your clit, swollen and exposed. He pressed, hard, and rubbed a rough circle.

Your back arched wildly against his restraining hand. A raw cry was torn from your very core, a sound so loud and ragged it scraped your throat. Your inner muscles clamped down on him in frantic, fluttering pulses, gripping him like a vise.

The feeling of you climaxing around him was the trigger. With a guttural groan that was pure animal satisfaction, he buried himself one last time, grinding deep. You felt the hot, sudden rush of his release inside you.

He held there, both of you locked together, shuddering. The only sounds were the ragged symphony of your breathing and the faint, electronic hum of the equipment.

Slowly, he softened and slid out of you. You heard him dealing with the condom, the soft toss into a trash can.

You couldn’t move. Your forehead was back on the cool glass, body trembling.

You saw his hand in the reflection. He reached for the microphone on the desk beside your head. He pressed a button. The red light went off. He had recorded it.

You pushed yourself up from the desk, your arms shaking violently. The cool air of the studio hit the wet mess between your thighs, a disgusting reminder. You turned to face him, your body screaming in protest at the movement. He was calmly wrapping the microphone cable around his hand, his expression unreadable.

“You… you recorded that?” Your voice was a hoarse shred of itself.

“I record everything.” He didn’t look at you, placing the mic back on its stand. “It’s a studio. That’s what I do.”

A hot, cleansing fury boiled up through the shame and the ache. It cut through the daze. “You’re sick.” The words were a whisper, then a shout. “You’re a fucking pervert!”

He finally looked at you, his sharp eyes assessing. “Am I?”

“You get off on this! On degrading me. That’s what this is!” You gestured wildly at the desk, at your own body, your voice cracking. “It’s not about the music. It’s about you being a twisted, controlling pervert!”

“That performance, right now, was the most honest thing you’ve ever done. I wanted the real thing.”

“That’s not me!” you screamed, the tears coming hot and fast now.

He walked to the laptop, his movements unhurried. He tapped a key, and the screen bloomed with a waveform. He clicked play.

The room filled with the raw, intimate cacophony of your own pleasure. First, the wet, slick sound of his fingers working inside you, obscenely amplified. Then your sharp, hitched breathing, the muffled sob against the leather couch. Your own voice, pleading “I can’t” in a tremulous whisper you hardly recognized.

You clapped your hands over your ears, but it was useless. You were hearing the pure need in the guttural moans that followed each brutal thrust.

“You set me up,” you whispered, the fury gone, replaced by a cold, sinking horror.

He closed the audio file. “You chose to come here. You chose to fight for the track. You chose to push. Your body chose to respond.”

Your hand moved before you could think. The slap cracked through the room. His head snapped to the side. A slow, red bloom appeared on his cheekbone.

He didn’t react. He just turned his head back, absorbing the shock, his eyes never leaving yours. A faint, almost approving smirk touched his lips. “Good.”

Then his hands were on you again. One palm cradled the back of your head, fingers tangling in your sweat-damp hair. The other splayed against the small of your back, pressing you into him. His mouth found yours.

You fought it for a second, teeth clenched, before a broken sound vibrated in your throat and you opened for him. He walked you backward until your knees hit the edge of the heavy steel desk. He broke the kiss, his breathing ragged.

He didn’t bother with a condom this time. He just gripped himself, gave two rough, slick strokes, and guided his head to your sore, swollen entrance. He pushed in with a deep thrust that made you gasp, your back arching off the cold metal.

Your body, despite everything, rose to meet his. A ragged, pathetic moan escaped you with each drive. You were wet for him again, a fresh, hot slickness that eased his passage and betrayed your every protest.

“This is the deal,” he grunted, his rhythm stuttering as he pushed deeper. “You want the art that matters? You pay for it here. I’ll give you a masterpiece to show the world. That’s the transaction.”

“That’s it,” he hissed, feeling your internal muscles begin their frantic flutter. Your legs wrapped around his hips, ankles locking, pulling him deeper into the mire of your own betrayal. “Come on it. Come on the truth.”

Your cunt clamped around him in rhythmic pulses, milking him desperately. It triggered his own release. He slammed into you one final, crushing time and groaned as he emptied himself deep inside your clenching heat.

He pulled out slowly. A gush of his spend followed, pooling beneath you. He found a box of tissues from a drawer and tossed it onto your stomach.

You mechanically cleaned yourself, wadding the tissues and letting them fall to the floor.

He was back at the laptop, his back to you. “Fine. The track stays on the album. Go home. Shower. Be back at ten for vocal comps. We’re finishing the album.”

You walked to the door on numb legs. Your hand paused on the handle.

“The recording,” you said, not turning around. “The raw file.”

You heard the clack of a single key. “Deleted.”

You didn’t believe him. You knew you would never speak of it again. You opened the door and stepped out into the sterile, bright hallway.

The demo he’d played earlier was still on the laptop, the track now irrevocably fused with the memory of your own screams. He highlighted the file: YN_AFTERHOURS_TAKE_H_FINAL.

He changed one letter. The H became a J.

YN_AFTERHOURS_TAKE_J_FINAL.

────୨ৎ────

The album drops on a Friday.

By Saturday morning it has charted in eleven countries. By Saturday afternoon the title track has two million streams and the comments section of every platform is a variation of the same thing: who is she and I did not know she could do this and where has this been hiding.

By Saturday evening your phone has become a continuous notification, buzzing against every surface you set it on. Chansung calls three times. The third call you answer.

"The numbers," he says, and then stops, like the numbers are too large to follow with a complete sentence.

"I know," you say.

"The label is—" Another stop. "There are no words."

He mentions a celebration dinner on Monday. Full label team, management, A&R, the marketing department who spent three months building the rollout. You agree to Monday. You hang up.

You sit on the floor for a while with your back against the bed and your phone face up on your knee, watching the notifications come in. Streaming numbers. Comment screenshots. A fan-made compilation of reaction videos set to the title track that someone has already edited together and posted, which you watch twice.

Seongje does not call. Seongje does not text.

You are not waiting for him to.

────୨ৎ────

The message arrives at 2 a.m.

A link. Below it, eight characters: the password.

Below that, a single word: Congratulations.

You sit up.

You look at the message for a moment, clicking it when you should probably wait. It’s seven in the morning and you are not fully awake. Whatever is behind a password-protected link that Keum Seongje sent at two in the morning is probably something you should approach with more preparation than you currently have.

The drive opens. It has an audio file, the filename a string of numbers with no title attached, the way his working files always look before he names them properly.

You put your earphones in and press play.

The opening is familiar. The bass line of After Hours settling into your sternum the way it always has, the production you spent six weeks living inside, the mix you know well enough to identify individual elements by the way they sit in the arrangement.

The difference arrives in the second half of the first verse, where the right channel comes in with the answer to your voice's question. It is his voice.

I'm not ready to go, he sings. His voice isn’t a performer's voice, not polished or produced in the way yours is, but it doesn’t need to be because he built the track around exactly what it is, something unguarded and direct, and the directness of it is worse than polish would have been.

You open the message thread.

You: what is this You: why does it sound like that You: you recorded yourself on it Seongje: The mix needed something in the right channel. Go listen to the rest of it. You: why did you put your voice on it Seongje: Twelve now. Chile came through last night. You: That's not what I asked. Seongje: Congratulations on twelve countries. The label dinner is Monday. Get some sleep. You: I'm still angry at you Seongje: I know

You look at the word for a long moment. It is the closest thing to an admission you have ever received from him.

You lie back against the pillow and close your eyes.

Seongje: Congratulations again