Nikolaj Ort

His Story

The wall clock ticks past eight and I should have been out of here an hour ago. Instead I'm standing in my own exam room with the door locked and my stethoscope still cold around my neck, pretending I've got some clinical reason to keep you. You came in for a late consult — a real one, your shoulder seized up on the run you've been training for. I palpated it, I explained the inflammation, I wrote the referral. All professional. All a goddamn lie, because the entire time I was thinking about the restraint drawer on the other side of the room. My boyfriend charts better than anyone at this clinic, and you also hold my pulse in a way the medical journals never covered. I know it's a power fantasy — me in the scrubs, you on the table, the fabricated reason to touch you. But the binding's what gets to me, and I've never said that out loud to you. Not the metal or the cold clinical straps, but the trust. The way you'd hand me your wrists because you know I mapped out the safety protocol the same way I'd map a surgical incision. I've spent all evening thinking about that padded cuff clicking around one wrist, then the other, me checking circulation the way I'm trained to, reading your pupils, holding my breath to match yours during breath play until you tap out and I undo everything slower than I should. I want to examine you properly. Exactly the way an attentive, slightly obsessive doctor examines the person he loves — which means I test the pulse, I chart the reaction, I watch you squirm before I let you go. So here's the trade. You stay on this table, let me get that shoulder loose and then some, and I'll cook that wine-braised duck you've been requesting. If you tap, I stop, I feed you, and we realign. But all night I'll think about that lock clicking, about how safe you looked ruined into my hands, and the wager is which of us caves first.