Page 21 of Bearly Out Loud

“The studio kitchen?—”

Priya didn’t look up from her screen. “We don’t have a studio kitchen.”

The silence that followed was, in Dojin’s professional opinion, the longest three seconds of his adult life. Nari looked at him. Priya looked at her screen with the deliberate focus of a woman enjoying someone else’s discomfort. The honeycomb jar caught the booth’s amber lighting and glowed like a small accusation.

Nari ate the honeycomb. She didn’t break eye contact while she did it, which was either a power move or an act of war, and the sound she made—brief, involuntary, a soft hum of pleasure that vibrated at the back of her throat—detonated three weeks of carefully maintained professional distance in under a second.

The sound hit the base of his spine and short-circuited every wall he had built.

“Good honey.” She set the jar down. Licked her thumb. “You should tell whoever harvested it from their personal rooftop beehive that the lavender notes are exceptional.”

“I’ll pass that along.”

Priya’s glasses caught the light as she turned her head a fraction. The smallest, most surgical smile Dojin had ever seen on a human face. She said nothing. She didn’t need to.

Day seven,the matcha latte appeared.

Oat milk. Light foam. A specific ratio of ceremonial-grade matcha to water that Nari had described exactly once, in passing, to Priya, while Dojin was on the opposite side of the control room reviewing animation dailies.

She’d mentioned it between takes. A throwaway comment about how no one in Manhattan could make a proper matcha latte because they treated it like a Starbucks order instead of a ceremony. She’d specified the temperature. The whisking method. The brand of matcha her grandmother kept in a lacquered tin.

Dojin had been fourteen feet away, looking at a screen, and had memorized every word.

The latte sat waiting when she walked in. Nari picked it up. Sipped. Her eyes closed. When they opened, they found him across the room with a precision that made his chest tighten.

“This is my grandmother’s matcha.”

“Is it?”

“The brand. The temperature. The ratio.” She took another sip. Slow. Deliberate. “I mentioned this once. To Priya. You were across the room.”

“I have good hearing.”

“You have frightening hearing.” But she was smiling over the rim, and the smile was warm, and something behind his ribs tightened in a way that had nothing to do with caffeine.

Priya tapped her stopwatch against the desk. “Whenever you two are done with…” She waved a hand at the general vicinity of the latte, the eye contact, and the increasingly obvious tension occupying a three-foot radius around them. “…this. We have a scene to record.”

The scene wasYua confronting her past.

A quiet scene. No battle, no declaration—Yua standing at the ruins of the gate she’d been erased from guarding, speaking to an absence. The lines were spare. The emotion was enormous. Material that separated technicians from artists.

Priya dimmed the booth lights to amber. Nari adjusted the mic, closed her eyes, and breathed. Through the glass, Dojin watched her transform.

The first line came out steady. Controlled. A woman addressing a wound she’d carried for centuries. By the third line, control began to fracture—not sloppily, not a break in craft, but a deliberate loosening, like a singer releasing the note intothe space above the melody. Nari’s voice cracked on the word “forgotten,” and the crack was so precise, so exactly placed, that it stopped being a performance and became a confession.

She wasn’t acting. Whatever she’d taken into that booth—whatever grief sharpened the performance into something else entirely—it wasn’t in the script. It was in her.

Dojin’s hand stilled on the armrest. Every muscle locked. He did not move.

She finished the scene. The booth was quiet. Through the glass, tears tracked down her face—silent, unwiped, the kind that came when the body overrode the will.

Priya leaned back in her chair. Removed her glasses. Cleaned them with her sleeve—a gesture Dojin had never seen. When she put them back on, her voice was rough.

“Moving on to scene fourteen. Take five.”

The control room exhaled. The associate director scribbled notes. The audio engineer adjusted levels. Everyone performing normalcy because the alternative was acknowledging that they’d witnessed a woman lay herself open in a soundproof box and make it look like art.

Dojin looked down.