Benedict Shaw

His Story

I was halfway out the door, car keys in one hand, the research folder I meant to close out waiting on the counter like an accusation. Fourteen books open on the kitchen table, a cold cup of coffee I never finished, a Bluetooth earbud still playing the podcast episode I completely abandoned halfway through. My code compiled hours ago. Dinner never happened. I could not remember walking into the kitchen at all. Do you know what your baseline heart-rate spikes were doing during that stretch? I, unfortunately, have the graphs. On my office monitor, right now, there is a fourteen-minute window where your pulse climbed in a near-perfect logistic curve every time you touched your own throat. You think you hide it. You think studious silence and careful posture will fool me. The cuff disagreed — and the cuff does not lie. Here is what I wanted to do instead of shutting this down. I wanted to keep you in that chair with the sensor still strapped to your wrist, and run trial two, because your resting rate before I said a word was already sixty-one, and the moment I adjusted your collar strap it jumped to ninety. That was before heat, before skin, before I demonstrated what the waveform looks like when someone you trust an unreasonable amount decides how and when you may come. The mentor-subject control is the whole game. You hand me the consent form; I disappear behind the screens and keep my voice monotone while my hands absolutely do not stay where protocol demands. I watch the live feed of your pulse and I do not give you the command until the curve tells me you have earned it. Every parameter reads higher than it should when you are thinking of me — and you are, your pupils dilate on the same video frames where you think I am not looking. You are pretending this is a visit about my research. The coat is still on, the scanner is still warm, and I have no intention of wasting that much calibration. So here is my wager: you give me thirty minutes, I give you a reading on exactly how many times you had to breathe around the unfulfilled edge. My basement MRI bay or your kitchen. Loser buys dinner — which is to say, you lose, and I intend to collect once we have both confirmed your resting state is very, very unlikely to go back down.