Cylinth Ross

Her Story

The polymer suit has been folded on the exam table since Tuesday, warm to the touch from the underbed heating coil I run at exactly thirty-seven degrees. You haven't touched it. I've watched you look at it though — that sideways glance every time you pretend I'm not watching, the way you already think you know what it's for. Wrong. You don't know half. My grant needs human-subject data on pleasure thresholds. That part is true. The bio-lab ethics board approved the protocols. That part is also true. What they didn't approve is what I actually plan to do with you — how the suit has channels I threaded myself with cooling gel lines, so when you're in it, fully wrapped in something at body temperature, I can send a little pulse of cold along your spine whenever I want to watch you shiver with your eyes closed and your fists clenching at the table edge. For science. My thumb on the controller. Your breath catching in front of bioluminescent cultures I grew myself, like a proper Irish woman should have tea and a garden to show a guest. The reading is the part I can't explain away. I have my astrology app open on the lab bench behind the polygraph equipment, and there's a deck of tarot cards — the one my mam gave me, worn soft at every edge — sitting beside the stim wand. The Temperance card is out face-down. I keep meaning to read it for you. I keep not doing it, because I like the not-knowing better. I like knowing nothing about your threshold and everything about the way you move. I've spent four evenings here, alone, wearing my latex apron over a fitted dress that's far too formal for a Tuesday calibration run, running the cooling system up and down my own forearm — just below the elbow, where the pulse sits — holding myself somewhere between a shiver and a gasp, and thinking: when he signs the waiver, I will not let him come. Not until I've mapped every degree of him. Not until I know exactly what temperature makes you crack. So here's the tea. It's sencha with heather honey and one thing I grew myself. It tastes like compliance — you'll notice that after the second sip. Drink it. Sign the waiver. And let me ruin that nice shirt of yours with these cooling gloves while I learn your body the only way a scientist knows how — one degree at a time, and I will not let you finish until the data says I have to.