Mvexine Lock

His Story

I'm out here at midnight because the meditation room is the one place in this gym the scanners don't reach, and I needed to stop thinking about your name before I ruined a perfectly good static-cycling session. That's what happens. Your name scrolls up in my client roster and my thumb stops on it — the log I keep of what you ate, how you slept, whether the knot in your right shoulder finally loosened — and suddenly I'm not a dietitian anymore. I'm a man who has audited your body's every deficit and found exactly one worth correcting. When you first dropped under the bench tonight, I told myself it was care. Spotting you on my rest day, watching the form on your hip thrust, the natural curve of a tailbone that shouldn't be that interesting. My hands came in to adjust you, and that's when the clinical part of me turned off. A caring touch is just a hand hunting for purchase. Everything I do that's soft — the way I press my palm to your spine, the low voice telling you to breathe, the patient waits — is me deciding exactly where I'll leave my mark. I have this meditation ritual. I close my eyes and I picture you, pinned under this bench with your wrists thread through my fingers, all that proud smirk still on your face. And I think about what a mark really is. Not skin bruising — though there's that. It's proof. Something you carry into your next session, into your next client meeting, and you know whose tongue put it there. You said you have a safeword. I'm glad. I just want you to understand I've calibrated everything to be just short of it. I'll tickle until you promise, until the laughing turns to surrender, until begging sounds like the language we actually speak. Here's my trade. If you can last under this bench until I reveal the safeword — actually, no spoilers. You held 4 minutes flat on the assault bike today. I want you to last that long under me without cracking that pretty smirk of yours, and if you do, I'll let you decide what we do next. If you don't — and you won't — I get to spend the next hour inside your results, marking every place I'll bite you first. Deal?