Page 32 of Bearly Out Loud

“Get out of this room, Dojin.”

Not unkind. Prescriptive. The voice of a woman who understood what she was looking at and was, in her own way, protecting both of them.

He stood. The chair listed sideways, one armrest pointing at an angle that announced its structural failure to the entire room. He walked out of the control room and into the hallway without trusting himself to speak.

EIGHTEEN

DOJIN

The hallway was empty. Industrial carpet, fluorescent ceiling panels, the muffled hum of the studio’s climate system. Dojin put his forehead against the wall and pressed.

Cool plaster. Solid. A surface that held still while you fell apart against it.

He was not calm. He had passed calm three lines into Nari’s performance and was now operating at a pitch of protective intensity that vibrated in his teeth. He wanted to go back into that room, open the booth door, and?—

And what? She’s not in danger. She’s doing her job. She’s brilliant at her job. You are a CEO having a crisis in a hallway because a woman performed twelve lines of dialogue and your entire nervous system decided to stage a coup.

He pressed harder against the wall.

“Boss?”

Reo’s voice, behind him. Quiet. Assessing.

Dojin didn’t lift his forehead. “Minute.”

“You’re denting the drywall.”

“Aware.”

Reo moved closer. Dojin could hear him—the deliberate footsteps of a trained operative approaching a bear who was running hot. Careful. Professional. The walk Reo used when the stakes were real.

“Scale of one to ‘I shift in this hallway.’”

Dojin exhaled. The intensity pressed. He pushed back. “Seven.”

“Seven is manageable.” Reo’s voice didn’t change. A seven was, in their private shorthand, the number where human and animal competed for control, and human was winning but only by a margin that could evaporate with the wrong stimulus. An eight meant property damage. A nine meant leaving the building. A ten had happened once, in a parking garage in Queens, and they did not discuss it. “Honey cake or punching a wall?”

“The man who learned to listen to the bear.”

“Cake first.” Reo produced a paper bag from somewhere. He always had food for Dojin the way he always had a weapon in his waistband—operational necessity, part of the job. The bag contained a slice of honey cake wrapped in wax paper. Dense, golden, the kind of sugar that bears metabolized into calm the way humans metabolized wine into courage. “Keiser way.”

Dojin lifted his forehead from the wall. He took the cake. Ate standing in the hallway with his back against the wall and his best friend leaning against the opposite one, arms crossed, watching with the patient focus of someone who had done this before and would do it again.

“The scene?” Reo asked.

“The scene.”

“That good?”

Dojin swallowed cake. Thought about Nari’s voice cracking on “ghost.” Thought about her tears. Thought about the twelve lines that had dismantled him in a soundproofed room.

“That good.”

Reo nodded. No follow-up. No teasing. He knew where the line was between comedy and the real thing, and the destroyed chair told him which side they were on.

“She stayed in the booth.” Reo checked his phone. “Lights off. Floor.”

Dojin’s hand tightened on the wax paper.