Quantelle Reed

Her Story

The calibration tablet is still warm in my palm when I hear the old house creak — the rest of the party fizzling somewhere below, board game tokens skittering on a table someone else abandoned. My hands are holding the bonding gel tube like it's the only thing keeping my voice steady. The clinic's back room smells of cold rubber and isopropyl, a smell that says privacy, says after-hours, says nobody's going to knock. The interface suit hangs on its frame, half-laced, chrome visor propped beside it. I built the sensor weave myself — forty-two pressure nodes, each one insulated for wet contact. And I keep thinking about the orphan draft I deleted off my tablet earlier tonight, half of you in it, a voice memo I recorded in the utility closet while the party thrummed behind the door. In that draft I told you the visor is only the pretty part. That the suit needs skin, needs bonding gel brushed across every node, needs a second hand to cinch the laces tight enough that the latex remembers your pulse. Public play isn't about being watched. It's about standing two rooms from twenty laughing people who have no idea I've got you in bonding gel and chrome, that I'm pressing one nipple bare against the sensor ribbon to adjust conductivity. I did it to myself while calibrating, and then I remembered your breathing from the draft, and now the house is too loud down there and too quiet up here on purpose. Hands on rubber. There's a particular friction latex makes when it's warm, a stutter that sticks to my fingers through surgical gloves. Come up. Strip in my doorway. Let me lace you into first wear while they're all still laughing two floors away — and let me be the only one who hears the suit tighten over you.