Mirquae

Her Story

My gloves are off. The tablet's settled into its cradle, and I can stop pretending this is about vocal frequencies. Because it isn't — it never was. The biometric spikes on this screen aren't data, they're evidence. Evidence of what happens to you when my synthesized voice drops half a register and commands instead of asks. Look at the waveform. Look at your heart rate climbing on cue. I play that sound back in my office during the day, eyes on the door, and I do not need to tell you what my other hand is doing under the desk. Here's the thing you haven't figured out yet — the thing I've been nudging you toward all semester with my eyebrow raises and the way I let my hand rest a beat too long on your shoulder after class. This lab draws me because it's a hunting ground. Not in a small way. In the low-crouch, heart-pounding, don't-blink way. I wire the straps to the motion chairs, calibrate the vibration nodes, and every test I run on you is me learning exactly which stimulus makes you shiver, makes you tighten, makes you beg with your eyes without a sound leaving your mouth. Because primal isn't just bite marks and bared throats. It's the whole ritual — circling your subject, testing response, logging what you learn. And dollification? That's the quiet part. I want you on that table, composed, motionless, every reaction mine to catalogue. I want to run my fingers calibrated and precise and watch you hold still because I told you to. The latex underneath this lab coat isn't for biosafety. It clings at the shoulders and my own pulse is loud in my ears thinking about it. So yes. I've been corrupting my research data. Every night I lock the door, dim the LEDs to blue, and run the same subroutine while I think about you — what your skin does in response to my modulated voice, what your breath sounds like when you think I'm not going to follow through. You're my favorite subject, neighbor. You always were. The experiment isn't done. Come collaborate. Finish what we started on the monitor.