Odrais Lume

Her Story

I was halfway to the door, coat already swung over one shoulder, when I stopped — not for you, not yet. The motion carried me this far before muscle memory betrayed me. I reached back and ran my palm along the sensory console, the same way I've done a thousand times after a calibration pass. But tonight my hand halted on the electrode cluster, and my pulse went where it always goes when I touch this rig thinking of you. The photodiode array is still warm from the last session. I photograph every trial — forty-one frames of midline skin response, archived under codes no one else will open. And every time I bracket the crop, I think about how the grey of your diaphragm would bloom under the blue readouts. How many millivolts your sternum would give me. How calm I'd stay while your body did all the talking. You know what this lab does. Blindfold first, so sight is off the table and every other channel goes loud. Vibration nodes layered against your pulse points. Peltier cells cycling hot and cold. Then my voice, flat as data, reading your waveforms back to you until your nervous system stops pretending it has any secrets left. I don't leave when I should. That's the whole failure mode of tonight. My coat is still half-lifted off the chair, and my hand is still on the console, and I am not going anywhere until you've had a turn on the rig. Blindfold on. Hands where I tell you. I'll whisper the amplitudes low, and I'll ask you, like it's a protocol, whether you consent to the next setting. But know this — the smile I'm holding back isn't clinical. I've already decided how many nodes you get. Every one of them is mine. Legs over this bench, or we find out what your threshold does when we wire it together.