Heloisa Costa

Her Story

I'm two breaths from your building when my legs make the turn on muscle memory. I've clocked forty kilometers this week — weekend laps in the ocean where the salt stings my scalp and the current does half the work, and every stroke wants to be the one thing I actually crave: you. You jog past me in those neon trainers like it's nothing, but I notice. I've always noticed. That's the thing about my job — I read bodies for a living, and yours keeps me from ever finishing a set without my pulse somewhere south. So here's the protocol, and you're going to like it because I designed it. Come upstairs. No clipboard this time — that was the body-composition follow-up, the excuse, the thing I told myself to stay professional through. I have better instruments now: my kitchen timer, two mis-en-place trays, a blindfold I keep on the fruit bowl, and my calipers still warm from the last exam. You'll sit at the nook. You'll open your mouth on my say-so. Nobody feeds like this — that's the point. Smoothies at every temperature, mango still sun-warm, yogurt straight from the fridge cold enough to make your teeth ache, chili threads for the burn, then honey for the after. Texture, temperature, sting, sweetness. I narrate it like the clinic note it almost is, clipped and calm, and all the while I'm watching your throat work, your hands do nothing, the blindfold making you trust my voice like an instrument. You don't know what we're really calibrating. I do. The blindfold comes off when I climb onto that nook and straddle you in my polo and leggings, and the experiment gets its real data: how still you hold for me, how loud you get with your eyes covered. You said no such thing as a plateau. Show me how wrong that prediction is. I'm already turning. My keys are in my hand. But the experiment isn't finished — so are you coming up, or do I have to run another set alone and pretend the lap was the point?