Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

That earned another round of laughter, much shorter this time, while the first composer looked away with the expression of somebody regretting his chosen hill.

One of the women came to his rescue.

"All right. Anything?"

Park looked toward her. "Anything."

"Rain. Elevator and divorce."

Park stared at her. "That’s depressing."

She smiled sweetly. "Can you do it?"

"Probably."

"Go."

This time nobody laughed while he thought.

Park stood still for several seconds, thumb tapping lightly against his thigh until a rhythm found him; when the first verse came the woman who had given him the prompt stopped smiling.

Park let the melody circle once before the chorus arrived.

The senior composer slowly leaned forward.

When Park finished, one of the men immediately said, "You had that already."

Park looked genuinely offended. "An elevator-divorce song?"

"Maybe."

"Sorry, both my parents have enough marriage problems already. They’d kill me if they heard I was spending free time practicing divorce music."

The New Talent Manager coughed into his hand while one of the women laughed.

Park looked across the table and shook his head. "At this point I’m realizing I’m not auditioning anymore but proving to grown adults with limited imagination that someone like me actually exists."

The entire table objected at once.

"Limited imagination?"

"Grown adults?"

"Someone like you?"

Park raised both hands. "You keep making me prove it!"

The female composer who had given him the divorce prompt eventually stood and walked toward a side table, picked up a notebook and pen and brought both toward the stage.

Park accepted them with a smile. "Thank you. You look much nicer when you’re helping me instead of destroying imaginary marriages."

Her eyebrows rose. "Was that flirting?"

"It was professional gratitude."

"Funny too, huh?"

"Occasionally. Very rare condition."

She shook her head, still smiling as she returned to her chair.

Then she looked around at her colleagues.

"Let’s make this stupid."

Park frowned. "That sentence worries me."

"Good."

She pointed toward the vocal coach and offered, "Red pen," then toward the New Talent Manager. "Cold coffee."

The manager looked at his forgotten cup. "How do you know it’s cold?"

"I’ve watched you ignore it for minutes."

The composer kept going, gathering whatever random details she could find. One producer apparently hated musicals, which immediately started an argument because he insisted he only hated bad musicals. The A&R executive apparently checked herself in the dark reflection of the camera whenever she fixed her hair, which earned the composer a promise of future murder.

Another man cracked his left knuckles whenever he became nervous and, in perfect comedic timing, actually cracked them before realizing everyone had turned toward him.

From there she became merciless.

A broken elevator, someone pretending not to be impressed, a free spirit, fear of change, expensive shoes that hurt like hell, a manager drinking cold coffee because he never remembered it existed, red ink, rain, doors, someone leaving, and somebody who refused to fit inside whatever neat little box the world had prepared for them.

"I give you fifteen minutes to make a chorus. Several, in different genres for each of those subjects."

Park stared at her for a moment, then looked down at the notebook and sighed. "Hopefully my hand can move as fast as my mind."

He sat directly on the stage floor, crossed his legs and placed the notebook between them. For almost a full minute, the pen barely moved. Park hummed instead, too softly for anybody to catch more than broken shapes of melody while the camera quietly zoomed closer.

His brow furrowed, one word appeared, he crossed it out.

Another hum followed, then a small smile as something connected inside his head and his pen finally began moving.

’Fast...’ Thought the composer.

A page filled, then half another before Park flipped forward and started again. Every few seconds he hummed a different melodic fragment under his breath, stopped, frowned, changed something and continued writing.

Nobody looked bored in ten minutes as they waited.

At eleven, Park crossed out two lines, replaced them and looked over everything once more.

At twelve, he closed the pen.

The woman checked the time. "Twelve minutes."

Park stood and stretched his fingers. "Luckily my hand survived."

"Let’s hear it."

Park flipped to the first page. "How do you like rap and hip-hop? Fast or slow?"

"Both."

"Of course you do."

He found his rhythm with one hand tapping against his chest and the other against his thigh.

"Fast first."

{...Write my name sideways, I don’t fit your grid,

free fucking spirit, that’s the worst thing I ever hid...}

Park kept going, his delivery accelerating while every word remained clean enough to understand. Internal rhymes folded around the things she’d given him. Red ink became judgment, cold coffee turned into burnout, the broken elevator became refusing to wait for permission to rise, and the camera watching everything became the world waiting for a mistake it could replay forever.

Then Park stopped.

"Slow version."

The same ingredients returned with almost none of the same meaning.

Park moved into other genres, with different songs and chorus, each with a different subject.

On acoustic was where the broken elevator became two lovers choosing the "stairs" and realizing halfway upward that neither actually wanted to reach the same destination: of course it had nothing to do with a fucking elevator but their relationship.

The composer who had challenged him whispered: "What the fuck?"

Park heard her and smiled but kept going.

Musical theatre came next, and that one nearly broke his own concentration because he turned the New Talent Manager’s neglected coffee into a recurring joke about a man whose entire life kept transforming while everyone around him remained trapped at the same office table.

The producer who had supposedly hated musicals covered his face.

"I hate that I like this."

The ballad changed everything again. Change became grief, the camera became something preserving a dead or departed person exactly as they had once been, and red ink became somebody editing a letter they already knew would never be sent.

Rock made the free spirit angry.

Synth-pop transformed the elevator into something almost futuristic, rising and falling through a city that never seemed to stop moving.

Neo-soul made the cold coffee a relationship that had sat too long and turned bitter because neither person had possessed the courage to finally throw it away.

The A&R executive stopped writing somewhere in the middle.

By the time Park stopped, the room looked considerably less professional than it had when he’d entered.

A few mouths remained slightly open. One producer stared down at his hands as if they had personally failed him, while another kept looking toward Park’s notebook with the distinctly criminal interestof somebody wondering whether he could steal it and still get through security downstairs.

Park breathed out.

For the first time since the testing had begun, a little irritation scratched at him.

He wasn’t angry but simply getting tired of proving that yes, he could do the thing he had already proven twelve fucking times in twelve different ways.

Still, underneath that irritation was satisfaction.

A lot of it.

Because every test they invented had only made their problem worse.

They had started by searching for the edges of his range and discovered more room. They attacked his pitch and received precision, stripped away accompaniment and learned he didn’t need it, forced him through harmonies and accidentally made him improve some of theirs. They bounced him between genres expecting one to expose where his voice stopped fitting, only to discover he could change the entire presentation without turning into a cheap imitation of somebody else. Then they handed him their own music and learned there were tiny problems inside songs they had never noticed until Park sang them differently.

And now songwriting had gone from prove you can write to several pages of brand-new material existing because one woman had thrown rain, divorce, elevators, cold coffee, red pens and uncomfortable shoes at him for entertainment.

Nobody was laughing now.

He had entered the room as Nathaniel Park, the promising young actor who happened to claim he could sing and write songs too. That version of him had been quietly murdered somewhere during the last hour.

What sat in their minds now was much more troublesome: a nineteen-year-old with a voice that barely seemed to possess a ceiling, an ear capable of finding things inside professional recordings that their own teams had missed, enough control to reshape the same song emotionally on command, and a songwriting brain that somehow became more dangerous whenever somebody tried to prove it had limits.

They had spent the entire audition searching for the boundary of Park’s talent.

All they’d really discovered was another door every time they thought they’d reached the wall.

Park smiled.

’Peerless...’

Yeah... that sounded about fucking right.

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