Chapter 439 | An Audience of One

Chapter 439: 439 | An Audience of One

"I don’t know how to not do it," she said.

"Yes you do."

"Kumiko."

"You did it in Jordan-kun’s kitchen." Kumiko’s chin came up. She had that expression she got when she was going to be gentle and merciless at the same time, which was a combination Chloe had not known existed until she met her. "Two weeks ago. Sunday. You were making eggs and you were singing that Korean ballad, the sad one about the winter, and you were loud and you did not care and I stood in the hallway with my hand on the door because I did not want to interrupt it. I cried, actually. In the hallway. Nobody knows that."

"I know that," Jordan said from the doorway.

"Nobody knew that except Jordan-kun." Kumiko flapped a hand at him. "So what was different?"

The answer was right there. It had been right there the whole time, sitting in Chloe’s mouth like a stone, and the reason she hadn’t said it out loud yet was that saying it out loud would make it true.

She looked past Kumiko. At the doorframe.

"I wasn’t performing," Chloe said.

Kumiko waited.

"I was just singing." Her voice did something ugly on the last word and she pushed through it. "For him. It wasn’t for anybody. It wasn’t a product. I was standing in his kitchen in his shirt and he was asleep upstairs and I thought nobody was listening, so I just."

She stopped.

"Sang," said Kumiko.

"Sang."

Jordan pushed off the doorframe.

He crossed the room in three steps and went down in front of her, one knee on the hardwood, so that his face came level with hers. Up close she could see the bruise Maya had left on his collarbone going yellow at the edges, and the older mark under it that Kumiko had put there Sunday and refused to be embarrassed about.

"Close your eyes," he said.

"That’s not going to fix the mechanical problem with my support, the issue is that I’m collapsing my diaphragm when I get to the—"

"Chloe."

"It’s not a psychological—"

"Close them."

She closed them.

The room went dark and the padding closed in and every nerve in her body reported for duty. She could hear Kumiko not moving. She could hear her own pulse in her ears, which was mortifying.

Then Jordan spoke, and he dropped his voice into that register.

She felt it before she processed it. The Alluring Whisper didn’t sound like anything special from the outside. Chloe had watched a bartender in Koreatown lose her entire train of thought from six feet away and hadn’t understood why until he used it on her. It came in low and warm and it didn’t go through her ears at all. It went through the back of her neck and down her spine and settled in the base of her skull like a hand on the back of her head.

"You’re not singing for the camera," Jordan said.

Her shoulders dropped an inch without asking her.

"You’re not singing for Kumiko. She loves you too much to be an audience, she’s already decided you’re good, she’s useless as a judge." A beat. "Sorry, Kumi."

"It’s true," Kumiko whispered.

"Right now it’s just us." His voice stayed down there, slow, unhurried, and Chloe’s breathing had started matching it somewhere along the way and she hadn’t noticed that happen either. "The camera doesn’t exist. This room doesn’t exist. You’re at the piano in that lavender studio with the gold records on the wall and Karina’s not even there. It’s you, and it’s me, and it’s the song. Nothing else got invited."

Her eyes stung behind the lids.

"Got it?"

She nodded.

"Now sing."

Chloe pulled the breath from the bottom.

And she let it go.

The first line came out of her whole body. Not her throat. Not the top of her chest where she’d been hiding it. It came up through the floor and her hips and her ribs and it filled the space between the eight acoustic panels and the foam couldn’t eat it fast enough.

She kept her eyes shut and stopped managing it.

She thought about the funeral home in Koreatown with the cheap folding chairs and her mother’s hand crushing her fingers. She thought about her father at the kitchen table on a Sunday with spam and kimchi on the stove telling her, with the absolute confidence of a man who had never had anything, that he was going to hear her on the radio someday. She thought about a closet with a ring light in it and a mask and a hundred and eighty thousand strangers who paid to want a woman who didn’t exist. She thought about a boy who spent three thousand dollars to sit across from that woman and then looked at the real one and decided the real one was better.

All of it went into the bridge.

Her voice went up and it did not shake.

Somewhere around the second chorus something changed in the room. Chloe felt it as pressure, the way your ears register a pressure drop before you consciously notice it, a thickening in the air that had nothing to do with acoustics. Her own sound came back to her bigger than she’d made it. Like the space had decided to help.

She didn’t stop to think about it. She rode it out to the last line and let the last note sit there and die on its own instead of clipping it short.

Then the room was quiet.

Chloe opened her eyes.

Kumiko’s hands were off the keyboard. They were in her lap, folded together, and she was looking at Chloe with her mouth slightly open, tears sitting on the rims of both eyes and not falling, and one of her cat ears had slid off entirely.

And Jordan.

Jordan was still on one knee in front of her and he was looking at her like she was the only thing in the building.

She had seen him look at her a lot of ways. Hungry. Amused. Wrecked. Mid-lie. She had catalogued every single one with a rigor that would have embarrassed her if she ever admitted to it.

She had never seen this one.