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# Chapter 7: Jaewon Yoo’s Eyes
While Yoo Jaewon pulled out his documents, Sea-ah looked down at her hands.
They rested on her knees, fingers short, knuckles thick. A scar from childhood — scraped against the rocks in Jeju — still marked the side of her left index finger. She kept her nails cut short out of habit, so they wouldn’t catch on the guitar strings during sessions. She knew these were her hands. She knew these hands had made melodies. But here, now, in this conference room, none of that meant anything.
Yoo Jaewon opened the document folder.
“Na Sea-ah, there are essentially two things we’d like to discuss with you today.”
His voice had the same quality as his glasses frames — metallic. Not sharp. Something more uncomfortable than sharp — precise. Not because it lacked feeling, but because it belonged to someone who understood feeling wasn’t necessary.
“The first is the credit issue regarding ‘By the Window.’”
Sea-ah lowered her hands beneath the table.
“The second is a conversation about how you might work with JYA going forward.”
Beside her, Park In-cheol slid his coffee cup slightly closer to himself. He said nothing. Sea-ah still couldn’t read what role he was playing here. Whether he’d arranged this meeting, or been dragged into it.
“To start with the credit issue,” Yoo Jaewon continued, “we’re aware that this wasn’t handled as clearly as it should have been. There were gaps in communication during the arrangement process.”
“It wasn’t a gap in communication.”
Sea-ah said it. Then realized she’d said it.
Yoo Jaewon paused. He looked at her through his glasses.
“You never intended to put my name on it from the beginning.”
The room went quiet. A low mechanical hum — air conditioning or ventilation, she couldn’t tell — drifted from the ceiling. Park In-cheol dropped his gaze to his coffee cup.
After a moment, Yoo Jaewon said, “I can’t tell you that judgment was wrong.”
It was an honest answer. Somehow, that made it worse. If he’d lied, she could have pushed back. But this wasn’t about arguing — it was about whether she accepted it or didn’t.
“Why.”
“In the music industry, credits are a negotiation. You weren’t part of that negotiation.”
“I wasn’t absent from the negotiation. I just didn’t know there was one.”
Yoo Jaewon looked at her. For the first time, differently — not the way he’d been reading documents, but the way a person looks at another person.
“You’re right,” he said. “That’s also true.”
Coffee arrived at the conference room.
White mugs with the JYA logo. One was set in front of Sea-ah. She stared at it for a moment. The same coffee they sold at the convenience store in Hapjeong, but in a different vessel — and somehow, strangely, that seemed to explain the entire meeting. The same thing in different packaging becomes a different thing. That was how this industry worked.
Yoo Jaewon slid a single sheet from the folder across the table toward her.
“This is what we’re proposing.”
Sea-ah picked it up. No title. Three paragraphs.
First paragraph: retroactive credit addition for ‘By the Window.’ Streaming royalty reconciliation applied retroactively. However, the applicable percentage would be limited to the pure composition contribution, excluding the arrangement contribution.
Second paragraph: exclusive songwriter contract offer. Fixed monthly payment, per-song incentive bonus, and provisions regarding credit attribution. However, credit attribution would be subject to negotiation depending on circumstances.
Third paragraph: upon signing the above contract, retroactive credit processing for ‘By the Window’ would be completed.
Sea-ah read the document again from the top.
Once more.
The third paragraph following the second was not an accident. To receive the retroactive credit, she had to sign the exclusive contract. And once she signed the exclusive contract, how her credits were listed became ‘negotiable.’ Negotiable meant JYA led the negotiation.
“The retroactive credit is tied to the exclusive contract.”
It wasn’t a question.
Yoo Jaewon nodded. “From our end, packaging it that way keeps things administratively clean.”
“It’s not clean for me.”
“It’s not a bad deal for you either. You’d have a steady monthly income, access to the company’s infrastructure, and your credits would get out there.”
“Credits that are ‘negotiable.’”
A brief silence.
Park In-cheol spoke for the first time. “Sea-ah, in this industry, these terms aren’t bad. Genuinely. Not many companies offer new songwriters a fixed monthly rate plus incentives.”
Sea-ah looked at him. He wasn’t wrong. Which made it worse.
“In-cheol, what do you think of this contract?”
He stiffened slightly.
“Not asking what you think of it for me — I’m asking whether you personally think this contract is fair.”
No one answered. Sea-ah set the document back on the table.
“I can’t decide today.”
Yoo Jaewon said, “Of course. Take all the time you need.”
He didn’t mention what ‘all the time you need’ actually meant. Sea-ah noticed that too.
As they left the conference room, Park In-cheol said under his breath, “Think it through carefully. Opportunities like this don’t come around often.”
Sea-ah didn’t answer. She pressed the elevator button. The doors opened, closed. The eighth floor became the first. In the lobby again, Bak So-jin’s poster. White dress, window, light.
Sea-ah walked out of the building.
The outside air was cold. Unlike the controlled temperature inside, out here the wind changed direction. She didn’t pull her coat collar up. She let the cold air wrap around her throat. Her throat had been scratchy since yesterday. That sensation became sharper now.
Walking toward Sinnonhyeon Station, Sea-ah read the three paragraphs again in her head. The sentences were precise. Written not in legal language but in office language — sentences that looked easy to read but required a different kind of understanding from easy reading to grasp what they actually meant.
She had no one around her who could read a contract.
Ha-neul was a tattoo artist. Ha-neul had said her own tattoo contracts were complicated, but that was a different world from music copyright. Jeong-ho oppa worked within the same kind of structure. Her mother was in Jeju. Do-hyeon was seventeen.
Standing at the subway entrance, Sea-ah took out her phone. She searched for copyright consultation resources. Korea Music Copyright Association. Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism copyright counseling. Free legal aid centers. Numbers and addresses filled the screen.
She closed the screen and went down into the station.
The subway was Gangnam at six in the evening. The after-work crowd flowed in the opposite direction. Sea-ah stood near the window, holding a strap. The Line 9 express moved fast. Stations blurred past.
Sinnonhyeon, Express Bus Terminal, Sapyeong, Noryangjin.
Sea-ah watched through the window. The underground tunnel streamed by. Fluorescent lights were set into the tunnel wall at even intervals. Each time one passed, her face flashed briefly in the glass and disappeared. Appeared, disappeared. There was a rhythm to it. Sea-ah began counting beats in that rhythm.
Four-four time. But the lights weren’t evenly spaced — the tunnel structure shifted them slightly. Not four-four. Off. Seven beats, then five. Sea-ah layered a melody over that irregular pulse. In her head. In a place no one else could hear.
This melody — I’m not selling it to anyone.
She thought that for the first time. A melody she’d just keep. Something she wouldn’t give to anyone.
The thought felt, strangely, warm.
And at the same time, that warmth felt, strangely, frightening.
She got off at Hapjeong and was walking toward the goshiwon when her phone rang.
Ha-neul.
“Hey, how’d the meeting go? Why haven’t you texted me?”
Sea-ah answered while walking. “Heading back now.”
“So what happened? Are they giving you the credit or did they pull more crap?”
“They brought a contract.”
“A contract? What contract?”
“Exclusive songwriter deal. Fixed monthly plus incentives.”
Ha-neul went quiet for a moment. Sea-ah couldn’t tell if the silence meant she was calculating something or that she was furious. Probably both.
“Hey.”
“Yeah.”
“Is it tied to the retroactive credit thing?”
Sea-ah paused mid-step, then kept walking. “Yeah.”
“Those bastards.”
Ha-neul’s voice dropped. Sea-ah knew that when Ha-neul was angry, her voice went down, not up.
“Sea-ah, do not just sign that. Okay? You need to show it to a lawyer.”
“Where am I going to find money for a lawyer?”
“There’s free legal consultation. Lawyers who specialize in music copyright. I’ll look into it.”
“Ha-neul.”
“What.”
“I told them I wasn’t signing.”
Ha-neul went quiet again. This time the silence had relief in it.
“Good. Seriously. But did you get a copy of the contract?”
“No.”
“What! Why didn’t you ask for one? Message them and say you need them to send it. You can review it without signing. That’s your right.”
Sea-ah turned into the alley toward the goshiwon. The streetlights were on, casting yellow pools on the ground. Somewhere nearby, the smell of ramen cooking. The scent of evenings in this alley.
“Okay.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Yeah.”
“Liar.”
“…”
“Hey, I’m in Hongdae right now. Can you come out? I’ll buy you gukbap.”
“It’s fine. I’m exhausted tonight.”
“It’s gukbap. Gukbap.”
Sea-ah stopped in front of the goshiwon entrance. She put her hand on the metal door. Cold. Inside was a narrow hallway, identical doors, and behind each one, its own silence. She had a feeling tonight that silence would weigh a little more than usual.
“Next time.”
“Hey—”
“I’m really tired. Thank you, Ha-neul.”
She hung up and opened the door.
The room was three pyeong.
Technically she’d never measured it. It just felt like three pyeong. Open the door and there was the bed, at the foot of the bed a small desk, on the desk a laptop, beside the laptop a stack of staff paper notebooks. No window. Ventilation worked if you left the door open. Sea-ah usually kept it closed.
She tossed her coat onto the bed. Undid the top two buttons of her shirt. Her throat hurt. The cold air from outside seemed to have gotten in. She pressed her hand to her neck. No fever.
She sat down at the desk.
She opened a staff paper notebook to the most recent page. What she’d written in the early hours of last night. An incomplete chord progression, melodic fragments, notes. Modulate in verse 2 — semitone or whole tone, change the rhythm in the bridge, still don’t know who to give this song to.
Her hand stopped at the last note.
Still don’t know who to give this song to.
She crossed it out.
And wrote something new above it.
This song — not giving it to anyone. For now.
She set down the pen and closed the notebook. Opened the laptop. Unmixed files sat on the desktop. Filenames made of dates. September 14, 2024. October 2, 2024. October 27, 2024. She created a new file with today’s date and typed in a name.
November 8, 2024 — Didn’t Sign.
Odd, as titles went. She left it.
She opened her DAW. New track. She turned on the vocal track, then off again — her throat was too raw to record tonight. Just the piano track. Imagining the feel of fingers settling onto keys — Sea-ah didn’t have a piano. No keyboard either. She had a MIDI pad, the mini kind, only twenty-five keys. It would do.
She plugged in the MIDI pad. The rhythm from the subway tunnel was still in her head. That shifting, lurching thing, seven beats into five. She entered the pulse first into a percussion track.
Sound came out.
A strange beat. Unstable, off-kilter. But it was right. It was the beat of a day like today. The beat of three contract paragraphs, the beat of Yoo Jaewon’s voice, the beat of elevator background music, the beat of Park In-cheol’s averted eyes.
Sea-ah began laying a melody on top.
Not a melody for anyone. Just stacking the sensations of the day somewhere. Not making sense of them. Just stacking. Until someday she’d know what they were.
About two hours later, there was a knock at the door.
People didn’t usually knock at the goshiwon. Everyone lived in their own room, in their own silence. Sea-ah took off her headphones and opened the door.
The building manager, the ajeonssi — early seventies, white permed hair, always wearing a fleece vest — stood in the hallway.
“Na Sea-ah, package came for you.”
She held out a small box. Sea-ah took it.
“Thank you.”
“What is it, heavy?”
“No.”
“You eat dinner? I saw you come in earlier and you weren’t carrying anything.”
Sea-ah said nothing for a moment.
“I ate.”
“Don’t lie to me, at my age I can always tell.” She clicked her tongue. “Go buy something. The GS25 down the street has triangle kimbap on sale.”
“I will.”
The ajeomma turned and shuffled away. Sea-ah closed the door.
She set the box on the desk. Checked the shipping label. Sender: Na Do-hyeon. Jeju City.
Sea-ah opened the box.
Inside were tangerines. Jeju tangerines. Small, bumpy-skinned ones. A sticky note was stuck on top.
Noona, Mom said to send these. But I said eat some too. Tangerines have vitamin C. So your throat doesn’t hurt. — Do-hyeon
Sea-ah read the note twice.
Do-hyeon knew her throat got sore every winter. Every time she called from Jeju, she’d mention it offhandedly — my throat’s been a little scratchy. Do-hyeon had remembered. He’d packed the box in Jeju, written the note, sent it all the way here.
She picked up a tangerine. Peeled it. The smell hit her — sweet and faintly bitter, wet. The smell of her mother peeling tangerines for her in the morning when she was little. Sea-ah breathed it in and closed her eyes.
The song of being alive.
The phrase surfaced from somewhere. Something her mother had told her as a child. The sound the haenyeo made when they broke the surface — sumbisori. The sound of exhaling just to survive. Her mother had said that was a song.
Sea-ah put a piece of tangerine in her mouth. Sweet. Her throat stung slightly, but it was sweet.
She sat back down at the desk. The DAW was still open on the screen. The track from before. A half-formed melody over the lurching percussion, seven beats into five.
Sea-ah put her hands on the MIDI pad.
And kept going. Picking up where she’d stopped. A song she wouldn’t give to anyone. A song that needed no credit. A song with no name.
And yet her fingers felt, somehow, lighter.
The next day was Monday.
Sea-ah had a convenience store shift at ten in the morning. She got up, washed her face, packed her apron into her bag, and was about to leave when her phone lit up with a notification. KakaoTalk.
No sender name.
An unsaved number. Sea-ah didn’t usually open messages from numbers she didn’t recognize. They were almost always spam or insurance.
She opened it.
Na Sea-ah, this is Kang Ri-u. We briefly crossed paths at the Underscore performance. I should have given you my card but didn’t. If you have time, I’d love to get coffee — would that be possible?
Sea-ah stared at the screen.
Kang Ri-u.
The Underscore performance. Thursday night. An empty glass on a table, Sea-ah singing the last song. The person sitting there watching.
She remembered him. Not because she’d tried to. She just did. During the performance she’d tried not to be aware of him and failed. The one Jeong-ho oppa had said afterward seemed like someone from JYA.
JYA.
Sea-ah thought of yesterday’s conference room. Yoo Jaewon’s voice, three paragraphs, Park In-cheol’s carefully averted gaze. Someone who worked in that building.
She didn’t reply. She went to work.
The convenience store shift was four hours.
Ten in the morning until two in the afternoon. Sea-ah moved mechanically. Scan, total, bag, thank you. Her thoughts were relatively quiet today. The two hours she’d spent at the DAW the night before had emptied something out. Not completely — Yoo Jaewon’s sentences floated to the surface occasionally. Credits are a negotiation. It still bothered her that he was right.
Around one o’clock, during a lull in customers, she checked her phone.
Kang Ri-u’s message was still there, unanswered. The read receipt was showing — it had marked read when she opened it that morning.
She read the message again.
We briefly crossed paths at the Underscore performance.
That phrase was strange. She had been on stage. He had been in the audience. It wasn’t a brief crossing. He had been there through three songs. Whether that counted as brief was something the speaker got to decide.
If you have time, I’d love to get coffee.
Sea-ah knew what coffee meant in this industry. Coffee was a proposal, or reconnaissance, or both. The way the Americano she’d paid sixty-five hundred won for in Gangnam yesterday had been both a proposal and reconnaissance.
She didn’t type a reply.
At two o’clock the shift ended. As she untied her apron, the store manager, Kim, said, “Sea-ah, can you come in Thursday night too? The regular closing shift person just got called up.”
“Sure.”
“Thanks. I’ll add the night shift bonus.”
Sea-ah nodded and stepped outside. The afternoon light fell low across Hapjeong — slipping in at an angle between the buildings. She stood for a moment in it.
She took out her phone. Opened Kang Ri-u’s chat window.
Anytime after Thursday works for me.
She sent it and put her phone away.
Walking, she wondered why she’d done that. He was from JYA. Something unpleasant had already happened at that company just yesterday. She hadn’t even known his name until today. And yet she’d replied.
She couldn’t explain it precisely.
But she knew one thing. At the performance, when she sang her last song, he had set down his glass. He had done nothing but listen. No counting beats, no calculating charts — just listened.
Not many people listened to Sea-ah sing that way.
That was the reason. Whether it was reason enough, she didn’t know. It just was.
Before Thursday came, two things happened.
One was a link Ha-neul sent. It arrived Tuesday morning via KakaoTalk.
Hey look at this. Free music copyright consultation center. Affiliated with the Korea Music Copyright Association. You just make an appointment. Not a lawyer, it’s a specialist counselor, but they can do a basic contract review.
Sea-ah clicked the link. A booking page came up. Wednesday afternoon at two the following week was open.
She booked it.
She sent Ha-neul a message. Made the appointment.
Ha-neul replied. Our Sea-ah is a legend. Take a photo as proof lol
The second was a KakaoTalk from Park In-cheol. Wednesday evening.
Na Sea-ah, have you had a chance to look over the contract? The company says they’d like a response by this week.
By this week. Sea-ah read that and heard Yoo Jaewon’s voice again. Take all the time you need. The shelf life of ‘all the time you need’ was one week.
She typed a reply.
Please send me a copy of the contract. I’ll be in touch after reviewing it.
Park In-cheol sent a PDF thirty minutes later.
Sea-ah saved it to her phone. She didn’t open it. She would bring it to the consultation next Wednesday.
Thursday night, there was a performance at Underscore.
Sea-ah arrived at the club at six in the evening and checked the set list. Jeong-ho had added a new song. One he’d finished last week, he said.
“I think we should run through this one in rehearsal.”
Jeong-ho nodded. “Yeah, we’re going in G major, and there’s a quick Em in the bridge.”
She listened once. Jeong-ho played and sang it through. The melodic structure was simple — in a good way. Nothing wasted. There was a climbing section in the chorus. Sea-ah gauged her throat against it. Still faintly scratchy. Whether she could make it to the top, she’d have to try.
“Let’s run it together.”
They rehearsed. Sea-ah took the climbing section carefully, pulling from the bottom of her lungs, keeping her throat loose. That was the best she could do with her throat today.
The note went up. Not all the way — about eighty percent. She knew where the other twenty was. She’d find it in the performance. It was always different in performance. Always. She knew this from experience. Eighty in rehearsal could become a hundred on stage. That twenty percent only came out in front of an audience. It never surfaced when she was alone.
After rehearsal, Jeong-ho said, “Your throat okay?”
“Fine.”
“You seemed like you were being careful just now.”
“It’s fine.”
Jeong-ho looked at her for a moment. He didn’t push. Sea-ah was grateful. If he’d pushed, she wouldn’t have known what to say.
The performance started at eight.
Thursday night at Underscore. Tables half full. The lights came down low, and Jeong-ho’s first song began.
Sea-ah stood at the microphone. She’d had her hair up, but tonight she let it down. No particular reason. She just wanted to.
The first song began.
Sea-ah sang with her eyes open. Looking at the audience. Each table, a different face. People who’d come alone, in pairs, in groups. People who were here on a Thursday night for their own reasons.
Second song, third song.
The fourth was Jeong-ho’s new one. The climbing section in the chorus. Sea-ah held her breath one beat longer — then let go.
The note came. Not eighty percent. A hundred. She couldn’t have explained how. Her throat hurt and the sound came out. It just came. It came where it was supposed to come.
At one table, someone stopped breathing. Sea-ah could hear it. She could hear those things during a performance — the sound of a glass being set down, a conversation cutting off, those sounds reached her. Tonight they did.
The song ended.
Sea-ah stepped half a pace back from the microphone. Jeong-ho started the intro to the next song. She took a sip of water. Her throat hummed faintly.
Then the door opened.
Underscore’s door was heavy. Every time it swung open, outside air and sound came in together. Sea-ah knew that sound. It had happened last Thursday too.
She didn’t look toward the door.
Jeong-ho began the intro to the fifth song. Sea-ah stepped back up to the microphone.
And then, strangely — she felt a gaze arriving from somewhere in the audience.
She began to sing.
She didn’t look to find where the gaze was coming from. She didn’t need to. The song came first. The song always came first.
But she knew the gaze was there. From somewhere near where it had been last week. Perhaps the same seat.
She sang with that awareness in her.
Her throat hurt. The sound came out. Both were true.
# Underscore, Thursday Night
—
The rehearsal room was cramped.
A space in the basement of Underscore — more accurately, a converted storage room. Low ceiling, acoustic foam pressed unevenly across the walls. Jeong-ho’s keyboard in one corner, a music stand beside it, and the spot where Sea-ah stood. One microphone stand. That was everything.
Sea-ah didn’t mind the space.
Small, low, sound-killing. Nothing came in from outside. Nothing she made went out. That sealed feeling was, at times, a kind of comfort. A place where failure was allowed. Where a cracked voice was allowed. Where just making sound was allowed.
Today her throat hurt.
It had started yesterday. She’d woken up to find the area near her left tonsil stiff, like something was caught there. Every time she swallowed, the feeling returned. It wasn’t severe — Sea-ah had learned to read her own throat with some precision. Years of practice. Today’s throat was a usable throat. Just one that required care.
Jeong-ho had said he wanted to add a new song to today’s rehearsal.
There’s a climbing section in the chorus, he’d said. He thought she could handle it. When she heard that, Sea-ah hesitated for a moment. Should she explain her condition. If she did, Jeong-ho would tell her not to push it. He’d push the new song to next week.
She didn’t say anything.
“Let’s run it together.”
The words came out. She hadn’t known they would. They just did. That feeling — the one she couldn’t explain, the one that said the song comes first — had made her say them.
They rehearsed.
Jeong-ho worked through the chords. Starting on C, a modulation partway through. Sea-ah followed the melodic line off the page. It was her first time through the song, but Jeong-ho’s songs generally stayed within a range she could handle. Whether that was intentional or coincidence, she’d never asked.
The chorus arrived.
Sea-ah pulled the breath in a beat early. Drawing it up from below the lungs. No tension in the throat. That was the best she could give it today.
The note came.
Not completely. About eighty percent. She knew where the other twenty lived. She’d find it in the performance. In performance, it was always different. Always. She knew that from experience. Eighty in rehearsal, a hundred on stage. That twenty percent only ever surfaced in front of an audience — it never came when she was alone.
Rehearsal ended.
Jeong-ho closed the keyboard lid and said, “Your throat okay?”
Sea-ah lifted her water bottle. “Fine.”