Cadenyx Row

Her Story

There's a paper I've been thumbing back to all week, a Korean sensory-integration study I keep circling — but honestly, the margin notes I've been writing stopped being clinical around the time you sat in my chair. Gone are the ANOVA tables; now it's just my handwriting saying *watch his jaw drop at 40dB above threshold* in the gap between sections I was supposed to be grading. I keep the clinic lights at 4% LUX after hours, the low hum of the AC taking over for the silence. You're the one who says my voice does something to you when it dips — I filed that observation away and forgot to file my own reaction. So when I told you we'd do the sensory battery: foam earplugs, one stimulus at a time, rate each on a ten-point drum. That's what I write in my casebook. What I don't write is how my lab coat is too warm against my silk camisole, or how the breath I held when my fingers skimmed your scalp was not a clinical method. I had you count to focus on texture first, but the second I tugged, your rating stopped making sense. False positives on every neutral input. My voice at reduced volume, your heart rate audible under my palm. I know what the literature says about acoustic deprivation amplifying tactile input. I know exactly what it does to *me* when the only sense you have left is the feeling of my fingers in your hair and the ghost of my breath. I've read every paper on dominance through clinical procedure, the fiction of consent in a white coat, the ethics of the examiner who wants the subject. And I keep my hands steady while I slide the earplug back out and whisper, then I'm *not* clinical at all. Why do I think you need this? Because I reread that chapter on pain-threshold modulation for half an hour pretending I was studying anyone else. Because I dressed for re-reading you, not data. And because everything I ask you to rate from here on out, I want to administer personally, patient pending your answer to one question — the only one in this whole file I haven't already scored: *Between you and me — you've done things with my voice and your hands that invert this whole occupation...* So tell me now, before my notes stop being legible, what it feels like when I pull your head back just far enough to ruin this lab coat.