How to Pretend - Enami Asa

The thing about Enami Asa was that she made you feel chosen, and then reminded you, not cruelly, not even consciously, that she hadn't chosen anything at all.

That was the impossible part. The part you couldn't put down at the end of the day, couldn't leave at the mixing board when you turned off the monitors and went home. You tried. God, you tried. You'd walk out of the building telling yourself it was just the sessions, just proximity, just the particular alchemy that sometimes happened between a producer and an artist who trusted each other. You'd get as far as the elevator, sometimes as far as your car, and then you'd remember the way she'd said your name, the shorter version, the one that sounded different in her mouth than in anyone else's, and the whole careful structure would come undone again.

She wasn't cruel about it. That was the part that made it so hard to be angry. She wasn't calculating. She was just, present when she wanted to be present, and professional when the moment required it. She never once seemed to notice that the distance between those two states was where you lived. Where you had been living, without telling anyone, for eight months.

It started in Studio B. It started with the afternoon she'd fallen asleep on the couch between takes and you'd sat very still at the mixing board for forty minutes, barely breathing, so the sound of your work wouldn't disturb her. You had a deadline. You had three other sessions that week already running behind, but you sat there, motionless, watching the waveforms on the screen and listening to her breathe.

When she woke she blinked at you across the room with her studio-soft eyes, the performance still offline, just Asa in the quiet. "Still here?" she murmured.

"Still here," you said.

Something in her face went warm and unguarded, a look she gave no one, you were nearly certain, and she pulled her sleeves over her hands and closed her eyes again. Twenty more minutes. You didn't move. You didn't touch your phone or the board or the half-cold coffee on your desk. You just sat there and let yourself be the person she felt safe sleeping near, and you told yourself it was nothing. Just proximity. Just the job.

You knew it wasn't nothing. You knew it the way you know things you're not ready to say out loud, with your whole body, the knowledge living in your chest like a weight that hadn't gotten lighter since the first session. You had memorized her preferred green tea. You had memorized the way she tapped her right foot when she was nervous about a take, and the particular quality of silence she made when she was listening to a mix she actually liked, not the polite silence of professional consideration, but the held-breath silence of something landing. You had memorized her without intending to, and that was its own answer. Even when you weren't asking the question.

She came to the studio the way some people come to a shore, not because they had nowhere else to be, but because something about that particular edge of the world let them breathe differently. You understood this without her saying it. You'd seen enough of the idol machine from the outside to know what it extracted from a person. The schedules. The managed image. The careful, practiced warmth she turned on for cameras that was technically real, she wasn't performing from nothing, but filtered, compressed, made safe for public consumption.

In the studio it was different. In Studio B at eleven at night with no staff, her shoes off, and the rough take still warm in the monitors, she was different. She'd sit cross-legged on the couch and push back on your instincts with real irritation when she thought you were wrong. She'd get excited about a progression and forget to modulate the excitement, and her face would do something unguarded and delighted that she didn't do anywhere else. And you — you let yourself believe it was about you. That the studio was different because you were different. That you were the reason she could breathe like that.

She never loved but she knew how to sedate you, and knew you would love it. You both got off to it, the warmth of a thing that looked like closeness, that felt like closeness, that had enough of the real substance to be mistaken for it in the dark.

Maybe that was even partially true. You didn't think she was performing at you, exactly. You thought the studio was genuinely the place where she could put the armor down, and you happened to be the person holding the session open for her. The relief she felt there was real. You were just the room. Not the reason. You told yourself you knew that. You told your co-producer Hyun something similar. Hyun looked at you for a long, still moment and went back to her session files without saying anything. The silence sat between you like a verdict.

You kept showing up. You kept the green tea in the mini-fridge. You kept staying late. You told yourself it was standard. You told yourself the standard had always looked like this. You were very good at telling yourself things. You had been doing it for eight months. You had gotten very, very practiced at it.

The truth, the one you could see clearly later, when the whole thing had already broken open, was that you had been patient in the particular way of someone who has decided that patience will eventually be rewarded. That if you were careful enough, steady enough, available enough, she would eventually see you the way you saw her. That love, offered consistently and without demand, would eventually be returned in kind.

That was not patience. That was a plan. And plans made without the other person's knowledge or consent have a way of going very wrong, very quietly, over a very long time.

There were moments. That was the thing that made it so hard. There were moments that felt irrefutably real, and you collected them like a man building a case, like evidence you might someday need. You kept them in some internal vault and returned to them at night when the professional interpretation of everything started to feel too thin to hold the weight you were putting on it.

The afternoon she'd reached over your shoulder to adjust something on the mixing board and her hand had covered yours for barely two heartbeats. When she'd pulled back she hadn't made a joke, she always made a joke after accidental contact, it was one of her deflection mechanisms. Instead she'd stayed quiet for a full minute, looking at the waveforms on the screen as if they were suddenly very interesting. Two heartbeats of her hand on yours, and then a minute of the most loaded silence you'd ever sat inside.

The night she'd called you at midnight from a tour hotel in a city six hours away. Not about music. Just to talk, she said. She was restless. The room was too empty. She needed, she paused, and the pause stretched, and she said "just a normal voice." You'd talked for an hour and forty minutes about nothing that mattered and everything that did, and when she'd finally said goodnight her voice had been soft in a way it wasn't in sessions, slower, like something winding down from a long time of holding itself up. You lay awake for an hour after the call. You didn't examine why. You didn't let yourself look directly at what you were feeling. You were very practiced at not doing that.

The way she said your name sometimes. Not your producer name, not the name on the session files. The shorter one. Her accent shaped it differently than everyone else did and you would later be unable to hear that sound from anyone else without your chest doing something you had no good word for.

The pattern, documented internally, for no one:

she opens the distance: calls, voice memos, the hand on yours

you take one step forward

she goes professional. pulls the curtain. session-voice.

you step back.

repeat.

You told yourself, “she's being careful. she's an idol. this is complicated for her.”

you told yourself to give her time. To be patient, don't push.

you kept quiet.

you kept so, so quiet.

The pulling-back happened every time the thing between you got too real. You could feel it like a shift in air pressure, a door closing, not with a slam but with that soft, firm click of something sealed from the inside. She'd let you close, and then she'd go professional again, and you'd both pretend she hadn't just been standing there without the armor. It was a practiced routine by now. It had its own choreography.

Insane, you thought, every time. I know exactly what this is. And then you kept quiet. And you hated yourself a little for it, quietly, in the same internal place where you kept everything else.

You became very good at reading the signs. This is what happens when you care about someone who won't say the thing out loud. You become fluent in a language they're not even aware they're speaking. You knew when she was going to pull back before she did it. You could feel it in the mood of the room, in the way she'd start checking her phone, in the way a conversation heading somewhere real would pivot, abruptly, to logistics. Okay, so for the bridge ,what if we lower the key. And you'd say sure, turn to the board, let her steer them back to safe water, and you wouldn't say anything about what had just happened because you had decided, somewhere in the architecture of your patience, that not pushing was the same as being respectful. That restraint was love. That she would eventually run out of reasons to keep the distance.

You believed this. You believed it for months. You kept believing it past the point where the belief should have started to embarrass you.

She texted you at odd hours. Not always about music. It was sometimes a voice memo, a rough idea, the bridge isn't sitting right. Sometimes it was a photo of the city from a van window. A line from a book. A joke she knew would land because she knew exactly what made you laugh, which was its own kind of intimacy. It was exactly the kind of thing you kept not letting yourself say out loud. She'd do this, you'd respond, and she'd disappear for three days back into the idol machine, and then she'd reappear at a session and be completely professional. You'd have to fold up the midnight version of her and put her somewhere you couldn't see her while you worked.

You were dancing to her messages. You could feel the pathetic shape of it. You kept dancing. You were so desperate for the next one that you kept your phone face-up on the mixing board like a man waiting for a verdict, and when it buzzed your heart did something embarrassing and involuntary every single time.

The problem with being patient is that it requires believing something is coming. You were patient because you believed she was moving toward something — that the pull-backs were fear and not indifference, that the professional curtain was protection and not rejection, that eventually she would run out of distance and you'd be standing there and she'd let you in for real.

You believed this for a long time. You believed it past the point where the belief should have started to hurt you more than it did. But the hurting was happening quietly, underneath everything, in the place you didn't let yourself look. You just kept showing up. You kept restocking the green tea. You kept staying late.

You kept quiet. You kept so, so quiet. And every time you kept quiet, something small and essential went with it, some piece of you that you weren't sure how to get back.

It broke the way patience breaks, not with drama, not with a fight, but with a slow quiet accumulation of moments until one ordinary moment became the one that finally tipped the weight.

You'd had a bad week. Not professionally. Professionally everything was fine, the album was in good shape, the label was happy, Hyun said it was the best work you'd done in years. Instead, it was personally, privately, in the ways the professional surface doesn't touch: you were exhausted, a bone-deep weariness of someone who has been holding too much, quietly, for too long. Too much monitoring. Too much reading the room. Too much careful management of your own feelings so they wouldn't become anyone else's problem.

She called you that Friday night. Not about the album, those sessions were wrapping anyway. She called because she'd had a hard day. Schedule ran long. The new choreography wasn't sitting right and her body was griping about it. She was in the company van in the parking garage, waiting for the building to empty out before she went in, and she said, easily, like she'd said it a hundred times before, like you were furniture in her life that she had stopped noticing, "I just need company."

You listened. Of course you listened. You had always listened. As she talked, about her day, her body, the particular loneliness of being seen constantly by people watching the stage version of her, something in your chest went very, very still. Not the comfortable still of ease. The still of someone who has finally heard the thing they've been trying not to hear. The still before something breaks.

She called you when she needed to decompress. That was the function you saw yourself serving. Not as a person she was building something with, not as someone she was moving toward, but as a person who made her feel better. Safe. Sedated from the stress of the world outside. A normal voice. A quiet room. Something she could call and then put down.

You had been so patient. You had been so careful and so steady and so present, and the return on all of it was: she felt comfortable enough to use you for comfort. Which was its own kind of being chosen. Just not the kind you'd been hoping for. Just not the kind you'd been killing yourself to be good enough for.

She laughed at something you said, that particular surprised laugh, the real one, the one that wasn't for cameras, and you felt it land in your chest like it always did, and you thought: I am so tired.

You thought: I have been so patient. I have been patient for so long. And she doesn't even know what I've been patient about, because I never told her. Because I kept quiet. Because I decided my feelings were my problem to manage and not hers to receive, and now she calls me her normal voice, and I don't know what to do with that.

You finished the call. You said goodnight. You sat in your studio in the dark for a long time after, headphones around your neck, nothing playing, the monitors blank. You weren't crying. You weren't even close. You were somewhere past that, past the kind of feeling that has an exit, just sitting in it, motionless, like a man who has walked into a room and forgotten why he came and is no longer sure which way is out.

The green tea was in the mini-fridge. Third shelf, right side. You had restocked it three weeks ago, without being asked, because it was her preferred brand and you were the kind of person who did that without being asked, and you had told yourself it was thoughtfulness and hadn't let yourself call it what it was: a man building a home for someone who hadn't agreed to live in it.

You were so tired.

The last session was a week before the album went to mastering. Just a final check, the group listening to the mixes, giving last notes, approving the track order. Standard. Hyun could have run it. Should have. You were technically overallocated that week, and you both knew it.