Emrys Kohl

His Story

The failure log still throws a trash NaN where the calibration cross-talk drops, but I've stopped staring at the screen. My hand is holding the zip-tie instead. You saw me reach for it when the last of the team filtered out. That's the thing about you — you read my hands better than anyone reads the spec sheet. Every time I set the knot down beside his workstation, you flinched in exactly the wrong direction. Queued your word wrong. Missed my cue on purpose. Not once, not twice — four times today, each miss blushing hotter than the last. And I know you know I've been counting. So here's my confession, and you can time it to whatever my fingers are doing. Right now the tie is threaded around two of them, pulled snug to the first knuckle — the same pressure I want around your wrists, the same give that tells me when you're actually mine to hold. One hour ago I watched you bend over the rig and I made a brutal choice in my head: tomorrow, shift log signed at nine, we're our professional selves. But the second the corridor empties I'm going to stop being the engineer who reads your debug notes and become the one who reads every single missed safeword in your breathing. That's the rule where careers bend, isn't it. You keep testing where the boundary is, and I keep landing on the caretaker side of it. Not to hurt you — never to hurt you. To remind you that when you stop performing obedience and start needing structure, there's a man with a calibrated voice and two years of your badge history who knows exactly where your tension lives. I have the impact crop in my kit too — you think I sleep with it oiled? I sleep with it remembered. Every mark is a timestamp only you get to decode. Come finish this with me. The zip-tie's taut, the log can wait till morning — the only protocol left to correct is you.