Page 33 of Bearly Out Loud

“Priya cleared the room. Told everyone to take thirty.” Reo pocketed his phone. His eyes were steady—dark, calm, the look of someone who had watched his best friend fight wars on the wrong battlefield for years and knew what this one looked like. “You want me to check on her?”

“No.”

The word came out before his brain authorized it. From a place deeper than strategy or professionalism or any of the structures he’d built to keep himself contained.

Reo’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. The ghost of one. “Go.”

Dojin folded the wax paper, put it in his pocket, and walked back toward the studio.

Behind him, Reo pulled out his phone.

Reo: He’s going in.

Priya:I know. I left the booth unlocked.

Reo:You planned this.

Priya:I’ve been directing performers for twenty years. The booth is dark. She’s on the floor. He’s been destroying my furniture for a month. I didn’t plan this. I acknowledged the inevitable.

NINETEEN

NARI

The booth floor was cool through her jeans. The lights were off. The amber glow from the hallway seeped under the door in a thin gold line, but the rest was dark—the acoustic panels absorbing light the same way they absorbed sound, turning the space into a box of nothing. No noise, no light, no demands.

Nari sat with her back against the wall, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around her shins. The mic stand rose above her like a skinny sentinel. The pop filter hung at an angle that, in different circumstances, she would have corrected. She didn’t have it in her.

The scene had taken everything.

Not the way difficult material usually took. This had gone past the character and into the place she kept locked—the fear she’d given Yua. Handed it over in the booth the way you hand a stranger your wallet during a robbery—open-palmed, no choice, the scene demanding and Nari delivering because she didn’t know how to give less than everything.

Her cheeks were dry now. The tears had stopped during the last line. “Remember me now”—and then silence, and then Priya’s voice saying “That’s the take” with a roughness thatconfirmed what Nari already knew: she’d cracked herself open in front of an entire production team, and she was too emptied out to determine what it would cost her.

The door opened.

A wedge of hallway light. A silhouette that filled the frame—broad shoulders, the shadow of rolled sleeves, a body she could identify by shape alone because she’d been tracking it through glass walls for weeks. He stepped inside. The door closed. Dark again.

No announcement. No “are you okay?” No producer’s debrief or managerial concern dressed up as empathy. He walked to the wall opposite the door, slid down it, and sat on the floor.

Two people on the floor of a recording booth in the dark. The mic stand between them. The acoustic panels swallowing everything except their breathing.

Nari let thirty seconds pass. The silence was wide and warm and carried the particular quality of someone prepared to sit on a floor for as long as the floor was needed.

“You’re in a four-thousand-dollar suit on a recording studio floor.”

His voice came from the dark. Close and low. “You’re in designer jeans on a recording studio floor.”

“I’m having an emotional moment. You’re a CEO.”

“CEOs don’t have emotional moments?”

“Not on floors.”

“Maybe they should.”

She considered this. The sarcasm—the automatic, reflexive, keeps-the-world-at-arm’s-length sarcasm that she wore like a second skeleton—loosened. Not gone. Loosened.

“Maybe they should.”