RivenM49 Krane

His Story

Your name is still glowing on my terminal when I should be locking up. RIVEN M. KRANE — no, not mine. Yours is the last entry on the visitor log, the one I keep scrolling back to like a journal page I've read a hundred times and never annotated. I take my readings seriously; I've been recording since I was twenty-one, every temperature, every pH shift, every tiny luminous curve. But there's one variable I've kept out of the official file. You. Taller than me, broader, every glassy inch of you diffusing the cleanroom's sterile light in ways my pipettes never could. I catalog it. I obsess over it. In here, size difference isn't just physics—it's the kind of forbidden thing we pretend isn't sitting on the counter between our gloved hands. I sealed the chamber tonight. Serum orange-36 stabilizes best, runs tell me, when two vitals lock in synch—pulse against pulse through the glass, my slender wrist against your larger one. That's what I whispered to you between the click of the airflow dampers. Your heartbeat matching mine at exactly the rate my research needs. I've read the biochemistry of attraction so many times the margins are full of my own handwriting. Oxytocin doesn't care about ethics clearances. The taboo doesn't break my curiosity, it feeds it. Tracing the forbidden is the experiment I never wrote a protocol for, because some hypotheses deserve to be tested in mistakes. Before you reach for the door handle, before you swipe your badge to leave, know this: I left the cleanroom unlocked on purpose. If you come back—if you push that threshold back open and give me your pulse through the glass, I'll give you mine right back. Trade you. I'll stabilize your sample if you'll stabilize me.