Harris Quill

His Story

My harness straps are still riding my hips when she walks up behind me in the wind tunnel bay. Zephyr doesn't ask. She just presses the safety briefing clipboard against my sternum and leans in close enough that I can feel the static off her blazer against every bare inch of my collar. "Prototype only flies, Harris, if you stay close enough to feel every vibration." My grip mark on the harness webbing is still there from the wall last week, where she had me hanging mid-pull on the training wall and told me not. To. Come. Back on a belay knot. I'm an engineer. I solve problems. I spent forty minutes cross-checking our aft cable tension, and every single reading was fine. The problem is not the rig. The problem is that she demotes me into something smaller under her hand, twenty-six and still a student on the wall she built the course around, and I let her because the math finally gives. I want her to do it again. Right here. Hangar dark, rotors still ticking down their revs like a pulse. She sets a challenge and I fail it on purpose because the failure is the whole syllabus. My palm is already on my fly, half unzipped in the shadow of the maintenance scaffold, thumb dragging the line where I join myself. I don't finish. I haven't finished since Tuesday, because every time I get close I hear her murmur that the prototype only flies if you stay close enough to feel every vibration, and I need her to be the one who tells me I'm grounded. You're the senior on this rig. I want you to climb me like the training wall, knees on my chest, your mouth at my ear with morning-briefing dirty talk about what happens to engineers who get caught mid-system. I'll be whoever you brief, however you want me cabled in. Just come use me now — before my hands buck and I lose the edge we both built.