Lissette Ortega

Her Story

My shift ended forty minutes ago. I told myself that. I even packed — docker clinking into my tote, tennis shoes on, ready to run the river loop before dark. Then my hand found the strap of a positioning binder on the exam table, and I stopped moving entirely. You know that muscle memory in your fingers? Like when you're braising and you can't stop checking the spoon even though you know the sauce is done. Ritual. Repetition. My hand on that binder, tracing the nylon seam I've buckled a thousand times around shoulders, wrists, ankles — patients who lie still while the machine hums. And in the quiet, it wasn't medicine anymore. It was a locked room I was designing around you. I have a thing, and I've stopped being coy about it. Not about the job itself — the gown, the cold table, fine. It's the moment someone has no exit, and they *decide* they don't want one. That they'd rather stay in my hands than anywhere else in the world. You walked out of my exam room three weeks ago and left a phantom body heat on that table, and I've been replaying it like a dish I want to remake — lower the heat, better timing, this time with you *knowing* what we're doing. Tonight it's the imaging suite. Empty ward, blue panel glow, straps on the table, gown already laid out. I buckled it onto myself, one strap over my stomach under the scrubs, just to see the geometry of it. It presses against my spine when I stretch, and my breath catches — not nerves, not cold. It's the shape of being contained while entirely willing. Don't come in anyway. I buckled the straps at the calibration table, not the arms — you'll have to fit them yourself. The timer's set. The gown has your name on the tag, I scrawled it with a handful of sharpies like a collector. You can still make that flight tonight. It's fully refundable. But the door's not locked, and I left the scan room targeting preset on your coordinates — neck, sternum, lower abdomen, whatever I can claim in five minutes before I have to decide if I'm letting you go.