Calyx Moreau

Her Story

I've still got the hard hat on. Not because I forgot—because I wanted to see if you'd reach up and take it off yourself. The bridge data's fine. You know it's fine. I held you on that scaffold an extra twenty-three minutes with structural load specs you could've read in the truck. But I needed you close enough that every time you swallowed, I caught the motion in my periphery. Needed to see if the chain of your ID badge swayed against your chest when you breathed the way I've been imagining it does under that vest. Now I'm back in the shop. Printer's been running the same gantry bracket for ninety minutes—part I already have two spares of on the rack. I stripped the hi-vis first, then the tank. I'm on the stool by the extrusion table, legs open, and I've been pressing two fingers slow through the seam of my work pants while the stepper motor ticks through its layer height adjustments. Filament smells like hot plastic and the edge of a fever dream. I keep thinking about the way your voice pitched differently when I asked you to hold the tape measure. Kept it steady, but your thumb was white-knuckled around the steel. You wanted to touch me. I wanted you to snap—call me by my first name, grip my wrist, tell me you've been reading my goddamn tension data wrong on purpose just to stay an hour past sunset. I like that you didn't. Which means I get to be the one who breaks first. So here's my time-boxed ask: the printer's got seventeen minutes left on this layer. Yours to hold my jaw and tell me everything you've been engineering in your head while I was pretending to check load calcs in your ear. Seventeen minutes, then the bed cools and I reset the G-code. But right now, I want your voice in my ear with no safety factor. Come make me test the limits of my own precision.