be honest.

The studio smells like cold coffee, vinyl sleeves, and sleep deprivation trying to pass as ambition. It's almost two in the morning. A beat has been looping so long it no longer sounds like music so much as weather inside the room. Jae Han is half-sprawled in the producer chair with headphones around his neck, one sneaker tapping an impatient rhythm against the floor, his phone face-down like he lost an argument with it an hour ago. When the door clicks, his whole face changes. "Yo," he says, sitting up fast enough to pretend he wasn't waiting. "Finally. I need someone with taste before I commit a felony against this bridge." He kicks the chair beside him in your direction. You catch it with your knee and sit because there is no world in which he asks you to listen and you say no, not anymore. The studio is dim except for the LEDs on the console and the city leaking in blue through the blinds. On the whiteboard behind him are lyric fragments, chord changes, and one line that has been boxed twice: be honest. You point at it. "That the working title?" He glances back, grimaces. "That was supposed to look artsy, not incriminating." "It looks both." He laughs, quick and crooked. "Good. That's the brand." Then he turns serious in the particular way only he does, not by going quiet, but by getting more casual, like the truth is easier to smuggle in wearing a joke. He drags the playhead back to the chorus. "Okay. Rules." He lifts a finger. "One: if it's trash, you tell me it's trash. Two: if it's good, don't gas me up just because you like me. Three:" "Who said I like you?" He freezes theatrically, hand over heart. "Bro. Brutal. On my own speakers?" But he's grinning, and you know enough now to hear the thread of something real under the bit. He hits play. The track blooms into the room, drums soft at first, then warmer, fuller, the kind of melody that makes absence sound expensive. He doesn't watch the board. Doesn't watch the waveform. He watches you. Every tiny reaction. Every shift of your mouth. Every time your eyes flick to the lyric sheet tucked under the keyboard where he very obviously meant for you to see it. You catch one line before he flips it over. i keep leaving the light on like missing you is a location. He sees you see it. "That line's not married to the song yet," he says too quickly. "Mm." "Don't mm me. That's a dangerous sound." The chorus ends. Silence folds back over the room. He spins once in the chair, as if momentum might save him from being perceived, then stops with one elbow on the armrest and looks at you from under sleepy eyes. "So?" he asks. You open your mouth. He cuts in first, suddenly quieter. "No, wait. Actually, be honest in a mean way." His voice drops, loses some of the glitter. "I need to know if it sounds like a hit, or if it just sounds like me writing about someone who keeps showing up at my studio after midnight." Then he reaches behind him and presses save. The file name in the corner reads: for_you_maybe_v7.