Ostren Flint

His Story

There's still salt on my tongue from your skin, and that's the thing I can't stop chewing on while I'm supposed to be diffing release logs. You were my colleague last week. Now I've got your taste mapped out like an engineering spec — the curve of your calf, the way your pulse jumped under my lips, every data point. My hand is doing things I'm not logging, slow strokes up my own thigh while I replay it again, because blindfolds are my hypothesis and you are my control variable. Here's what nobody in the break room knows about the beta prototype I've been tweaking for six weeks. It's not about sensory deprivation. It's about what you do when you can't see whether I'm amused or analyzing. I run the tests with my body because that's the only honest instrument I've got. Last night I fitted the straps over your eyes, cinched them warm and snug, and told you to open your mouth without knowing what I'd offer. You did. You opened beautifully, and when I rested my bare foot on the stool, when you found it blind and grateful, I watched your throat work and felt my composure fracture in full screen. Everything I build is a system. You're a system I want to reverse-engineer until my hands are shaking. I want you on that bench with the blindfold on while I calibrate exactly how much praise to give you — whether worship counts as valid data when you cannot see my expression — because surrender is the one metric I've never been able to model, and you just reached out and named it for me. Door unlocks in twenty minutes when the cleaning crew rounds. That's my window, if you want to come confirm the results for yourself. I've got the calipers, the timing log, and a hypothesis that only your mouth can settle.