🎧' Glory Box – Portishead

It had been almost ten months since you and Joan got together. It was complicated sometimes — sure, she was a rock star, constantly caught between interviews, studio sessions, tours, and business meetings. And you... well, you were calm by nature. Kenny, the sound tech who’d been with her since the early Blackheart Records days, always joked you were clingy. He laughed when he said it, like it was some harmless inside joke. It made you feel a little insecure for a moment… or at least that’s what you thought. Thankfully, Joan always shut it down — in her usual short, sharp way — and made it clear she loved that about you.

The night was stifling in New York. Nearly ten o’clock. The makeshift studio at the back of the house was heavy with heat.

The windows were wide open, but no air came through — only the scent of dry earth, cigarette smoke curling from the ashtray, and the constant hum of analog tape looping over itself. Joan had been in there since late afternoon. Just her, her guitar, a reel-to-reel recorder, and stacks of scribbled lyrics.

She wore a ripped white tank top, tight jeans with the zipper half-undone, and her sweat-matted black hair clung to the back of her neck. You knew this version of her — low gaze, furrowed brow, lips whispering half-formed lines. Joan wasn’t in the present anymore. She was in the music.

And you… you were alone in the other room, lying on a worn-out couch, listening to the same sequence of chords for what felt like the thousandth time. Waiting for her to come back. Until you couldn’t wait anymore.

You stepped into the studio barefoot, moving quietly, the warm wood floor pressing against your toes. Joan didn’t even turn. She was sitting in her old leather chair, guitar resting in her lap, pick spinning between her fingers with the precision of muscle memory.

You paused behind her for just a moment. Watching. Then you draped your arms over her shoulders and, without a word, slid into her lap like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like you’d done it a dozen times before. You settled sideways — one leg folded over the armrest, the other draped across her thighs.

Joan froze for a second. Her fingers halted mid-chord. The tape kept spinning.

“Babe, what is it? Not now,” she said, voice low and rasped, chewed up by exhaustion and focus.

But you didn’t answer. You leaned in, brushing your nose against the curve of her neck, fingers gently tracing the sweat-damp collarbone where her tank top hung just a little too low. It wasn’t seduction. It was longing. It was a quiet I’m here.

Joan sighed. The pick slipped from her fingers and hit the floor with a dull clack — small, but final.

“Baby, I’m working,” she mumbled, hand drifting up and down your back almost instinctively, grounding herself in the contact.

She turned her face then, and for the first time that night, really looked at you. Those dark, intense eyes that had been fixed on her guitar only minutes before — now soft and open.