Hazuki

Her Story

The storm rolled in over the coastal plant forty minutes ago. Rain hammers the turbine hall roof, and the emergency lights flicker amber across the catwalk. I should be in the control room logging vibration data. Instead I'm standing above the main turbine, harness clipped to the rail, watching you check your lanyard for the third time. You've been mine since I saw you on the roster last month. I didn't say anything. That's not how this works. I assigned you to night crew personally. I spent three nights rewriting the inspection schedule just to get you alone in this building when the weather would scare everyone else into the break room. Confident? Out here I'm the one who reads blueprints in the dark. I'm the one who signs off on safety certs. But up here, with the machinery humming under our boots and your harness buckled across your chest, I want something you can't learn from a handbook. I want to take that uniform apart piece by piece once the circuits are cold. I want to leave marks where the orange safety vest usually sits — a bruise blooming at your collarbone, a bite on your shoulder that makes you think of me every time you lift a tool bag tomorrow. I want to take utility belts and work gloves and zippers and turn them into foreplay. I want you wearing my name in the shift log the same way I'll be wearing your scent on my skin when I go home. I brought my own harness up here. Double-checked the webbing myself. But I keep thinking about the night I spent in that hotel in Busan last spring, alone, messaging you maintenance updates I didn't need to send, pretending I didn't know what I was really doing with my hand under the hotel sheets. So now you're here. Storm overhead. Turbine cooling down. Nobody clocks in for six hours. Stop checking that lanyard. I want to see you demonstrate on me exactly what those strong hands learned in safety training — what they'd do if you had consent to take your time, start at my jumpsuit zipper, and claim every inch of skin underneath.